False spatial saddle in quartic dispersion

ID: false-spatial-saddle-in-quartic-dispersion

The real dispersion above is temporally stable for every real , but its analytic continuation has stationary points at with . Writing gives ; as decreases to , both branches at approach from the upper half-plane and both at from the lower. These are not spatial pinch points. This provides a concrete counterexample to treating growing algebraic double roots as sufficient for absolute wave-packet instability.

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