Instability for standing waves of nonlinear Klein-Gordon equations via mountain-pass arguments

Abstract

We introduce mountain-pass type arguments in the context of orbital instability for Klein-Gordon equations. Our aim is to illustrate on two examples how these arguments can be useful to simplify proofs and derive new results of orbital stability/instability. For a power-type nonlinearity, we prove that the ground states of the associated stationary equation are minimizers of the functional action on a wide variety of constraints. For a general nonlinearity, we extend to the dimension N = 2 the classical instability result for stationary solutions of nonlinear Klein-Gordon equations proved in 1985 by Shatah in dimension N ? 3. ? 2009 American Mathematical Society.