Overhanging solitary water waves

We provide the first construction of overhanging gravity water waves having the approximate form of a disk joined to a strip by a thin neck. The waves are solitary with constant vorticity, and exist when an appropriate dimensionless gravitational constant $g>0$ g > 0 is sufficiently small. Our construction involves combining three explicit solutions to related problems: a disk of fluid in rigid rotation, a linear shear flow in a strip, and a rescaled version of an exceptional domain discovered by Hauswirth, Hélein, and Pacard (Pac. J. Math. 250:319–334, 2011). The method developed here is related to the construction of constant mean curvature surfaces through gluing, and can be applied to other overdetermined elliptic problems.