Instability of solitons for the critical generalized Korteweg—de Vries equation

Abstract. We prove in this paper the instability of the solitons for the critical generalized Korteweg—de Vries equation. We obtain this result by a qualitative study of the solution close to the soliton and obtain a large set of initial data giving the instability. This study is a step towards the existence and description of blow up solutions.