On variational formulations for steady water waves (Q1362781)

The paper is concerned with the Hamiltonian formalism for the two-dimensional steady water-wave problem modelling the flows of inviscid, irrotational fluid in a domain of finite or infinite depth, bounded above by a free surface and driven by the effects of gravity and surface tension. The flows are stationary relative to a uniformly translated frame of reference. The boundary value problem is treated as a dynamical system and it is shown that the differential equations and the nonlinear free-boundary conditions can be obtained from a trajectory of a particular Hamiltonian system. The latter is a triple \((M, \Omega , H)\), where \(M\) is a manifold, \(H:M\to \mathbb{R} \) is a continuously-differentiable function called the Hamiltonian, and \(\Omega\) is a symplectic 2-form. The form \(\Omega\) is an assignment of a bounded alternating 2-linear map \(\Omega |_{m}:(TM|_{m})^2 \to \mathbb{R}\) to each point \(m\in M\), where \(TM|_{m}\) is the tangent space to \(M\) at \(m\). Each Hamiltonian system has an associated Hamiltonian vector field \(v_H \) defined by the formula \(dH|_m (v|_m )=\) \(\Omega |_m (v_H |_m ,v|_m )\) for all \(v|_m \in TM|_m \) where \(dH|_m \) is an element of \(T^{\ast}M|_m \), the cotangent space to \(M\) at \(m\), i.e. \(dH|_m \) is a 1-form defined on \(M\). Hamilton's equations for the Hamiltonian system \((M, \Omega , H)\) are the differential equations \(\gamma ^{'}=\) \(v_H |_{\gamma (x)}\) which determine the trajectories \(\gamma :(a,b)\to M\) of the Hamiltonian vector field. For the flows with surface tension no boundary conditions is imposed a priori to define \(M\). It is explained that the domain of \(v_H \) consists of points of \(M\) that have extra regularity and satisfy natural boundary conditions. The kinematic boundary conditions emerge as a consequence of the definition of \(v_H \), and the dynamic boundary condition follows from Hamiltonian equations. In the absence of surface tension, a Hamiltonian system is proposed in such a way that the dynamic free-boundary condition emerges as a criterion for membership of the domain of \(v_H \). The Lagrangian formalism is also developed and is shown to be equivalent to the Hamiltonian one by using the convex duality theory.