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Title:  On the interaction between interfacial solitary waves

Speaker: Hai Yen Nguyen
             Centre de Math´ematiques et de Leurs Applications, Ecole Normale Sup´erieure de Cachan and CNRS

ABSTRACT:

The theory of internal waves at the interface between two immiscible fluids is important
not only in ocean engineering but also in the mathematical modelling of equations that exhibit
nonlinearity and dispersion. Boussinesq-type equations, which have been widely used
to model the propagation of long and weakly nonlinear waves on the surface of water, are
used in our work to model the propagation of waves at the interface between two contiguous
homogeneous fluids of different constant densities and different thicknesses. A model consisting
of two equations has been obtained which allows the numerical study of the head-on
collision of solitary waves. A comparison between our model and the model based on Hamiltonian
long-wave expansions obtained by W. Craig, P. Guyenne, H. Kalisch, (2005) has also
been carried out.