On the (in)validity of the NLS-KdV system in the study of water waves

Abstract

It is universally accepted that the cubic, nonlinear Schrodinger equation (NLS) models the dynamics of narrow-bandwidth wave packets consisting of short dispersive waves, while the Kortewegde Vries equation (KdV) models the propagation of long waves in dispersive media. A system that couples the two equations seems attractive to model the interaction of long and short waves and such a system has been studied over the last few decades. However, questions about the validity of the system in the study of water waves were raised in our previous work where we presented our analysis using the fifth-order KdV as the starting point. In this paper, these questions are settled unequivocally as we show that the NLS-KdV system or even the linear Schrodinger-KdV system cannot be resulted from the full Euler equations formulated in the study of water waves.