Symmetric doubly periodic gravity-capillary waves with small vorticity

Abstract

We construct small amplitude gravity-capillary water waves with small nonzero vorticity, in three spatial dimensions, bifurcating from uniform flows. The waves are symmetric, and periodic in both horizontal coordinates. The proof is inspired by Lortz' construction of magnetohydrostatic equilibria in reflection-symmetric toroidal domains. It relies on a global representation of the vorticity as the cross product of two gradients, and on prescribing a functional relationship between the Bernoulli function and the orbital period of the water particles. The presence of the free surface introduces significant new challenges. In particular, the resulting free boundary problem is not elliptic, and the involved maps incur a loss of regularity under Fr\'echet differentiation. Nevertheless, we show that a version of the Crandall-Rabinowitz local bifurcation method applies, by carefully tracking the loss of regularity.