It is well known that the water-wave problem with weak surface tension has
small-amplitude line solitary-wave solutions which to leading order are
described by the nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation. The present paper contains
an existence theory for three-dimensional periodically modulated solitary-wave
solutions which have a solitary-wave profile in the direction of propagation
and are periodic in the transverse direction; they emanate from the line
solitary waves in a dimension-breaking bifurcation. In addition, it is shown
that the line solitary waves are linearly unstable to long-wavelength
transverse perturbations. The key to these results is a formulation of the
water wave problem as an evolutionary system in which the transverse horizontal
variable plays the role of time, a careful study of the purely imaginary
spectrum of the operator obtained by linearising the evolutionary system at a
line solitary wave, and an application of an infinite-dimensional version of
the classical Lyapunov centre theorem.Comment: The final publication is available at Springer via
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00205-015-0941-
