Traveling Wave Solutions to the Free Boundary Incompressible Navier-Stokes Equations

In this paper we study a finite-depth layer of viscous incompressible fluid in dimension $n\ge 2$, modeled by the Navier-Stokes equations. The fluid is assumed to be bounded below by a flat rigid surface and above by a free, moving interface. A uniform gravitational field acts perpendicularly to the flat surface, and we consider the cases with and without surface tension acting on the free interface. In addition to these gravity-capillary effects, we allow for a second force field in the bulk and an external stress tensor on the free interface, both of which are posited to be in traveling wave form, i.e., time-independent when viewed in a coordinate system moving at a constant velocity parallel to the rigid lower boundary. We prove that, with surface tension in dimension $n\ge 2$ and without surface tension in dimension $n=2$, for every nontrivial traveling velocity there exists a nonempty open set of force and stress data that give rise to traveling wave solutions. While the existence of inviscid traveling waves is well-known, to the best of our knowledge this is the first construction of viscous traveling wave solutions. Our proof involves a number of novel analytic ingredients, including: the study of an overdetermined Stokes problem and its underdetermined adjoint problem, a delicate asymptotic development of the symbol for a normal-stress to normal-Dirichlet map defined via the Stokes operator, a new scale of specialized anisotropic Sobolev spaces, and the study of a pseudodifferential operator that synthesizes the various operators acting on the free surface functions. © 2022 The Authors. Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.