Wave breaking in the Whitham equation

Abstract

We prove wave breaking --- bounded solutions with unbounded derivatives --- in the nonlinear nonlocal equation which combines the dispersion relation of water waves and a nonlinearity of the shallow water equations, provided that the slope of the initial datum is sufficiently negative, whereby we solve a Whitham's conjecture. We extend the result to equations of Korteweg-de Vries type for a range of fractional dispersion.