A variational reduction and the existence of a fully localised solitary wave for the three-dimensional water-wave problem with weak surface tension (Q1750303)

This article considers fully localised solitary wave (travelling-wave) solutions to the Laplace's equation, with boundary conditions, describing the fluid motion in a domain bounded below by a rigid horizontal bottom and above by a free surface. The existence result, for weak surface tension, is presented by performing a local variational reduction, which converts the governing system to a perturbation of the Davey-Stewartson variational functional; a nontrivial critical point of the reduced functional is found by minimising it over its natural constraint set.