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The $m$-waves of Kelvin are uniformly rotating patch solutions of the 2D Euler equations with $m$-fold rotational symmetry for $m\geq 2$. For Kelvin waves sufficiently close to the disc, we prove a nonlinear stability result up to an arbitrarily long time in the $L^1$ norm of the vorticity, for $m$-fold symmetric perturbations. To obtain this result, we first prove that the Kelvin wave is a strict local maximizer of the energy functional in some admissible class of patches, which had been claimed by Wan in 1986. This gives an orbital stability result with a support condition on the evolution of perturbations, but using a Lagrangian bootstrap argument which traces the particle trajectories of the perturbation, we are able to drop the condition on the evolution. Based on this unconditional stability result, we establish that long time filamentation, or formation of long arms, occurs near the Kelvin waves, which have been observed in various numerical simulations. Additionally, we discuss stability of annular patches in the same variational framework., Comment: 37 pages, 2 figures, presentation updated, typos corrected

We prove linear in time filamentation for perturbations of the Lamb dipole, which is a traveling wave solution to the incompressible Euler equations in $\mathbb{R}^2$. The main ingredient is a recent nonlinear orbital stability result by Abe-Choi. As a consequence, we obtain linear in time growth for the vorticity gradient for all times, for certain smooth and compactly supported initial vorticity in $\mathbb{R}^2$. The construction carries over to some generalized SQG equations., Comment: 24 pages

For the axisymmetric incompressible Euler equations, we prove linear in time filamentation near Hill's vortex: there exists an arbitrary small outward perturbation growing linearly for all times. This is based on combining the recent nonlinear orbital stability obtained in [13] with a dynamical bootstrapping scheme for particle trajectories. These results rigorously confirm numerical simulations by Pozrikidis [45] in 1986., Comment: 32 pages, 1 figure, minor corrections

In this article, we prove nonlinear orbital stability for steadily translating vortex pairs, a family of nonlinear waves that are exact solutions of the incompressible, two-dimensional Euler equations. We use an adaptation of Kelvin's variational principle, maximizing kinetic energy penalised by a multiple of momentum among mirror-symmetric isovortical rearrangements. This formulation has the advantage that the functional to be maximized and the constraint set are both invariant under the flow of the time-dependent Euler equations, and this observation is used strongly in the analysis. Previous work on existence yields a wide class of examples to which our result applies., Comment: 25 pages