Reflection of internal gravity waves in the form of quasi-axisymmetric beams

Abstract

Preservation of the angle of reflection when an internal gravity wave hits a sloping boundary generates a focusing mechanism if the angle between the direction of propagation of the incident wave and the horizontal is close to the slope inclination (near-critical reflection). This paper provides an explicit description of the leading approximation of the unique Leray solution to the near-critical reflection of internal waves from a slope in the form of a beam wave. More precisely, our beam wave approach allows to construct a fully consistent and Lyapunov stable approximate solution, $L^2$ -close to the Leray solution, in the form of a beam wave, within a certain (nonlinear) time-scale. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first result wherea mathematical study of internal waves in terms of spatially localized beam waves is performed.\\%A beam wave is a linear superposition of rapidly oscillating plane waves, where the high frequency of oscillation is proportional to the inverse of a power of the small parameter measuring the weak amplitude of waves. \\%Being localized in the physical space thanks to rapid oscillations (and high variations of the modulus of the wavenumber), beams are physically more relevant than plane waves/packets of waves, whose wavenumber is nearly fixed (microloca\-li\-zed). At the mathematical level, this marks a strong difference between the previous plane waves/packets of waves analysis and our approach. \\%The main novelty of this work is to exploit the spatial localization of beam waves to exhibit a spatially localized, physically relevant solution and to improve the previous mathematical results from a twofold perspective: 1) our beam wave approximate solution is the sum of a finite number of terms, each of them is a consistent solution to the system and there is no artificial/non-physical corrector; 2) thanks to the absence of artificial correctors (used in the previous results) and to the special structure of the nonlinear term, we can push the expansion of our solution to next orders, so improving the accuracy and enlarging the consistency time-scale.Finally, our results provide a set of initial conditions localized on rays, for which the Leray solution maintains approximately in $L^2$ the same localization.