A solitary wave is a localized coherent structure that maintains its shape while it travels at constant speed. Solitary waves are caused by a cancellation of nonlinear and dispersive effects in the medium. In this talk, we discuss a special type of solitary wave: wavepacket solitary waves. In contrast to the celebrated KdV soliton, wavepacket solitary waves have intrinsic length scale and feature oscillatory decaying tails. Two examples, capillary-gravity waves and flexural-gravity waves, will be presented to illustrate the importance of wavepacket solitary waves, the numerical methods for constructing these waves and their dynamics.
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