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Zbl 1034.76011
Schneider, Guido; Wayne, C. Eugene
The long-wave limit for the water wave problem. I: The case of zero surface tension.
(English)
[J] Commun. Pure Appl. Math. 53, No. 12, 1475-1535 (2000). ISSN 0010-3640

The paper revisits the classical problem of the description of long small-amplitude weakly nonlinear weakly dispersive surface waves in a long channel, neglecting the capillary effects. The analysis starts with a system of equations for two-dimensional irrotational inviscid flow. It is proved that, on a relatively short time scale, $\sim 1/\epsilon$, a general initial perturbation, in the form of a localized pulse, splits into two pulses which travel in opposite directions. At a longer time scale, $\sim \epsilon^{-3}$, each of the two pulses splits into an array of solitons obeying Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation. At the latter time scale, it is also proved that collisions between solitons can be described asymptotically correctly by KdV equation. The proofs are based on estimates of the difference between the solutions to the full water-wave system of equations and the asymptotic KdV equation. A novelty in comparison with previous works analyzing the rigorous correspondence between the full system and the approximation based on the KdV equation is that the class of functions admitted in the analysis does not exclude solitons and soliton trains.
[Boris A. Malomed (Tel Aviv)]
MSC 2000:
*76B25 Solitary waves, etc. (inviscid fluids)
35Q51 Solitons
76M45 Asymptotic methods, singular perturbations

Keywords: Korteweg-de Vries equation; Boussinesq equation; soliton; two-dimensional irrotational inviscid flow; perturbation; soliton trains

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