A rigorous justification of the modulation approximation to the 2D full water wave problem (Q411360)

It is known that the one-dimensional nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NLSE) describes the propagation of small-amplitude two-dimensional irrotational waves on the surface of the infinitely deep inviscid incompressible liquid. The present paper produces a rigorous proof of the validity of the NLSE on the time scale \(\sim \epsilon^{-2}\), if the initial amplitude of the surface perturbation is estimated as \(\epsilon^{3/2}\). The analysis is performed in a properly defined Sobolev space of the solutions.