Giovanni Gravina

Carnegie Mellon University

Talk Title: Variational methods for the study of water waves

Abstract: In this talk we will consider a one-phase Bernoulli free boundary problem whose solutions correspond to steady periodic water waves moving on the free surface of an irrotational flow above a flat impermeable bed. We will show that solutions with non-flat profile can be found variationally as global minimizers of the classical Alt-Caffarelli energy functional and study the behavior of the free boundary near the fixed boundary.