Existence of capillary-gravity water waves with piecewise constant vorticity

Abstract

In this paper we construct periodic capillarity-gravity water waves with a piecewise constant vorticity distribution. They describe water waves traveling on superposed linearly sheared currents that have different vorticities. This is achieved by associating to the height function formulation of the water wave problem a diffraction problem where we impose suitable transmission conditions on each line where the vorticity function has a jump. The solutions of the diffraction problem, found by using local bifurcation theory, are the desired solutions of the hydrodynamical problem.