3D gravity water waves with vorticity

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Dan Ginsberg, Princeton University
Fine Hall 322

We prove a long-term regularity result for three-dimensional gravity water waves with small initial data but nonzero initial vorticity. We consider solutions whose vorticity vanishes on the free boundary and use this to derive a system for the evolution of the free boundary which reduces to the Zakharov/Craig-Sulem formulation in the irrotational case. We are able to continue the solution until a time determined by the size of the initial vorticity in such a way that if the vorticity is zero, one recovers a lifespan T ~ ϵ^{−N} where N can be taken arbitrarily large if the initial data is taken to be arbitrarily smooth.