An Estimate for the Morse Index of a Stokes Wave

Stokes waves are steady periodic water waves on the free surface of an infinitely deep irrotational two-dimensional flow under gravity without surface tension. They can be described in terms of solutions of the Euler–Lagrange equation of a certain functional; this allows one to define the Morse index of a Stokes wave. It is well known that if the Morse indices of the elements of a set of non-singular Stokes waves are bounded, then none of them is close to a singular one. The paper presents a quantitative variant of this result.