Abstract. We study the nonlinear stability of a large class of inhomogeneous steady state solutions to the Hamiltonian Mean Field (HMF) model. Under a simple criterion, we prove the nonlinear stability of steady states which are decreasing functions of the microscopic energy. To achieve this task, we extend to this context the strategy based on generalized rearrangement techniques which was developed recently for the gravitational Vlasov-Poisson equation. Explicit stability inequalities are established and our analysis is able to treat non compactly supported steady states to HMF, which are physically relevant in this context but induces additional difficulties, compared to the Vlasov-Poisson system.

Slowly modulated water waves are considered in the presence of a strongly disordered bathymetry. Previous work is extended to the case where the random bottom irregularities are not smooth and are allowed to be of large amplitude. Through the combination of a conformal mapping and a multiple‐scales asymptotic analysis it is shown that large variations of a disordered bathymetry can affect the nonlinearity coefficient of the resulting damped nonlinear Schrödinger equations. In particular it is shown that as the bathymetry fluctuation level increases the critical point (separating the focusing from the defocusing region) moves to the right, hence enlarging the region where the dynamics is of a defocusing character.