On the Standing Wave Problem in Deep Water

Abstract.

We present a new formulation of the classical two-dimensional standing wave problem which makes transparent the (seemingly mysterious) elimination of the quadratic terms made in [6]. Despite the presence of infinitely many resonances, corresponding to an infinite dimensional kernel of the linearized operator, we solve the infinite dimensional bifurcation equation by uncoupling the critical modes up to cubic order, via a Lyapunov—Schmidt like process. This is done without using a normalization of the cubic order terms as in [6], where the computation contains a mistake, although the conclusion was in the end correct. Then we give all possible bifurcating formal solutions, as powers series of the amplitude (as in [6]), with an arbitrary number, possibly infinite, of dominant modes.