Global in time behavior of viscous surface waves: horizontally periodic motion (Q2567321)

The authors consider the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations with horizontally periodic boundary conditions, fixed bottom (i.e. the homogeneous Dirichlet condition) and fixed atmospheric pressure on the top (i.e. the kinematic boundary condition \(\partial_t \eta = u_3 - (\partial_1\eta )u_1 - (\partial_2\eta )u_2 - (\partial_3\eta )u_3\) with \(y=\eta(x',t)\) the description of the free boundary and \(u\) the velocity field). Under the assumption that the initial velocity is sufficiently small and the initial free surface does not change much from the constant, together with natural compatibility conditions, the authors show that there exists a unique strong solution to the initial-boundary problem described above. Moreover, if the initial values are sufficiently small (possible smaller than needed for the existence part), the solution decays exponentially fast. The proof is based on transformation of the problem to the fixed domain and its linearization.