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For many years, I have been puzzled by the limiting form of solitary waves at the air/water interface and its consequence on wave breaking. It turns out that the air plays an important role. With my Chinese colleagues from the Institute of Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and my old collaborator Prof. Jean-Marc Vanden-Broeck, we performed careful numerical simulations to study the limiting configuration of interfacial solitary waves. The details are presented in a paper that just came out in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics (https://doi.org/10.1017/jfm.2021.521)

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