Capillary–gravity waves of solitary type and envelope solitons on deep water

The existence of steady solitary waves on deep water was suggested on physical grounds by Longuet-Higgins (1988) and later confirmed by numerical computation (Longuet-Higgins 1989; Vanden-Broeck & Dias 1992). Their numerical methods are accurate only for waves of finite amplitude. In this paper we show that solitary capillary-gravity waves of small amplitude are in fact a special case of envelope solitons, namely those having a carrier wave of length 2π(T/ρg)1½2 (g = gravity, T = surface tension, ρ = density). The dispersion relation c² = 2(1-11/32α²_max) between the speed c and the maximum surface slope αmax is derived from the nonlinear Schrödinger equation for deep-water solitons (Djordjevik & Redekopp 1977) and is found to provide a good asymptote for the numerical calculations.