Overhanging solitary water waves

Abstract

We provide the first construction of overhanging gravity water waves having the approximate form of a disk joined to a strip by a thin neck. The waves are solitary with constant vorticity, and exist when an appropriate dimensionless gravitational constant $g>0$ is sufficiently small. Our construction involves combining three explicit solutions to related problems: a disk of fluid in rigid rotation, a linear shear flow in a strip, and a rescaled version of an exceptional domain discovered by Hauswirth, H\'elein, and Pacard \cite{hauswirth-helein-pacard}. The method developed here is related to the construction of constant mean curvature surfaces through gluing.