Traveling-Standing Water Waves

Abstract

We propose a new two-parameter family of hybrid traveling-standing (TS) water waves in infinite depth that evolve to a spatial translation of their initial condition at a later time. We use the square root of the energy as an amplitude parameter and introduce a traveling parameter that naturally interpolates between pure traveling waves moving in either direction and pure standing waves in one of four natural phase configurations. The problem is formulated as a two-point boundary value problem and a quasi-periodic torus representation is presented that exhibits TS-waves as nonlinear superpositions of counter-propagating traveling waves. We use an overdetermined shooting method to compute nearly 50,000 TS-wave solutions and explore their properties. Examples of waves that periodically form sharp crests with high curvature or dimpled crests with negative curvature are presented. We find that pure traveling waves maximize the magnitude of the horizontal momentum among TS-waves of a given energy. Numerical evidence suggests that the two-parameter family of TS-waves contains many gaps and disconnections where solutions with the given parameters do not exist. Some of these gaps are shown to persist to zero-amplitude in a fourth-order perturbation expansion of the solutions in powers of the amplitude parameter. Analytic formulas for the coefficients of this perturbation expansion are identified using Chebyshev interpolation of solutions computed in quadruple-precision.

Keywords

• water waves
• traveling waves
• standing waves
• shooting method
• numerical continuation
• quasi-periodic motion