Smooth travelling-wave solutions to the inviscid surface quasigeostrophic equation

Abstract : We construct families of smooth travelling-wave solutions to the inviscid surface quasi- geostrophic equation (SQG). These solutions can be viewed as the equivalents for this equation of the vortex anti-vortex pairs in the context of the incompressible Euler equation. Our argument relies on the stream function formulation and eventually amounts to solving a fractional nonlinear elliptic equation by variational methods.