Existence and conditional energetic stability of solitary gravity-capillary water waves with constant vorticity

Abstract

We present an existence and stability theory for gravity-capillary solitary waves with constant vorticity on the surface of a body of water of finite depth. Exploiting a rotational version of the classical variational principle, we prove the existence of a minimiser of the wave energy $\mathcal H$ subject to the constraint $\mathcal I=2μ$, where $\mathcal I$ is the wave momentum and $0< μ\ll 1$. Since $\mathcal H$ and $\mathcal I$ are both conserved quantities a standard argument asserts the stability of the set $D_μ$ of minimisers: solutions starting near $D_μ$ remain close to $D_μ$ in a suitably defined energy space over their interval of existence. In the applied mathematics literature solitary water waves of the present kind are described by solutions of a Korteweg-deVries equation (for strong surface tension) or a nonlinear Schrödinger equation (for weak surface tension). We show that the waves detected by our variational method converge (after an appropriate rescaling) to solutions of the appropriate model equation as $μ\downarrow 0$