Optimal shape of an underwater moving bottom generating surface waves ruled by a forced Korteweg-de Vries equation

It is well known since Wu & Wu (1982) that a forcing disturbance moving steadily with a transcritical velocity in shallow water can generate, continuously and periodically, a succession of solitary waves propagating ahead of the disturbance in procession. One possible new application of this phenomenon could very well be surfing competitions, where in a controlled environment, such as a pool, waves can be generated with the use of a translating bottom. In this paper, we use the forced Korteweg-de Vries equation to investigate the shape of the moving body capable of generating the highest first upstream-progressing solitary wave. To do so, we study the following optimization problem: maximizing the total energy of the system over the set of non-negative square-integrable bottoms, with uniformly bounded norms and compact supports. We establish analytically the existence of a maximizer saturating the norm constraint, derive the gradient of the functional, and then implement numerically an optimization algorithm yielding the desired optimal shape.