Symmetry breaking in periodic and solitary gravity-capillary waves on water of finite depth

A weakly nonlinear model is developed from the Hamiltonian formulation of water waves, to study the bifurcation structure of gravity-capillary waves on water of finite depth. It is found that, besides a very rich structure of symmetric solutions, non-symmetric Wilton's ripples exist. They appear via a spontaneous symmetry breaking bifurcation from symmetric solutions. The bifurcation tree is similar to that for gravity waves. The solitary wave with surface tension is studied with the same model close to a critical depth. It is found that the solution is not unique, and that further non-symmetric solitary waves are possible. The bifurcation tree has the same structure as for the case of periodic waves. The possibility of checking these results in low-gravity experiments is postulated

Non-symmetric gravity waves on water of infinite depth

Two different numerical methods are used to demonstrate the existence of and calculate non-symmetric gravity waves on deep water. It is found that they appear via spontaneous symmetry-breaking bifurcations from symmetric waves. The structure of the bifurcation tree is the same as the one found by Zufiria (1987) for waves on water of finite depth using a weakly nonlinear Hamiltonian model. One of the methods is based on the quadratic relations between the Stokes coefficients discovered by Longuet-Higgins (1978a). The other method is a new one based on the Hamiltonian structure of the water-wave problem