The Ostrovskyi (Ostrovskyi-Vakhnenko/short pulse) equations are ubiquitous models in mathematical physics. They describe water waves under the action of a Coriolis force as well as the amplitude of a “short” pulse in an optical fiber. In this paper, we rigorously construct ground traveling waves for these models as minimizers of the Hamiltonian functional for any fixed L2 norm. The existence argument proceeds via the method of compensated compactness, but it requires surprisingly detailed Fourier analysis arguments to rule out the nonvanishing of the limits of the minimizing sequences. We show that all of these waves are weakly nondegenerate and spectrally stable.
