A geometric formulation of the conservation of wave action and its implications for signature and the classification of instabilities

Action, symplecticity, signature and complex instability are fundamental concepts in Hamiltonian dynamics which can be characterized in terms of the symplectic structure. In this paper, Hamiltonian PDEs on unbounded domains are characterized in terms of a multisymplectic structure where a distinct differential two–form is assigned to each space direction and time. This leads to a new geometric formulation of the conservation of wave action for linear and nonlinear Hamiltonian PDEs, and, via Stokes's theorem, a conservation law for symplecticity. Each symplectic structure is used to define a signature invariant on the eigenspace of a normal mode. The first invariant in this family is classical Krein signature (or energy sign, when the energy is time independent) and the other (spatial) signatures are energy flux signs, leading to a classification of instabilities that includes information about directional spatial spreading of an instability. The theory is applied to several examples: the Boussinesq equation, the water–wave equations linearized about an arbitrary Stokes's wave, rotating shallow water flow and flow past a compliant surface. Some implications for non–conservative systems are also discussed.