Small divisor problem in the theory of three-dimensional water gravity waves

Abstract

We consider doubly-periodic travelling waves at the surface of an infinitely deep perfect fluid, only subjected to gravity $g$ and resulting from the nonlinear interaction of two simply periodic travelling waves making an angle $2\theta $ between them. \newline Denoting by $\mu =gL/c^{2}$ the dimensionless bifurcation parameter ($L$ is the wave length along the direction of the travelling wave and $c$ is the velocity of the wave), bifurcation occurs for $\mu =\cos \theta$. For non-resonant cases, we first give a large family of formal three-dimensional gravity travelling waves, in the form of an expansion in powers of the amplitudes of two basic travelling waves. "Diamond waves" are a particular case of such waves, when they are symmetric with respect to the direction of propagation.\newline \emph{The main object of the paper is the proof of existence} of such symmetric waves having the above mentioned asymptotic expansion. Due to the \emph{occurence of small divisors}, the main difficulty is the inversion of the linearized operator at a non trivial point, for applying the Nash Moser theorem. This operator is the sum of a second order differentiation along a certain direction, and an integro-differential operator of first order, both depending periodically of coordinates. It is shown that for almost all angles $\theta $, the 3-dimensional travelling waves bifurcate for a set of "good" values of the bifurcation parameter having asymptotically a full measure near the bifurcation curve in the parameter plane $(\theta ,\mu ).$