G.Vekstein
School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Manchester, UK

Landau resonance mechanism for wind generated water surface waves

Although humans have watched a wind making waves on a water
surface for millennia, the actual mechanism of this natural
phenomenon was understood only 50 (!!) years ago, when the
proper mathematical theory has been developed.

Here I present a simple physical interpretation of this
theory, which has a profound analogy with the Landau
resonance damping of plasma waves. The essential role of
the integrals of motion (the vorticity for an inviscid
fluid, and the particle distribution function for a
collisionless plasma) in these processes will be
explicitly demonstrated.