Statistical properties of extreme soliton collisions

Synchronous collisions between a large number of solitons are considered in the context of a statistical description. It is shown that, during the interaction of solitons of the same signs, the wave field is effectively smoothed out. When the number of solitons increases and the sequence of their amplitudes decay slower, the focused wave becomes even smoother and the statistical moments get frozen for a long time. This quasi-stationary state is characterized by greatly reduced statistical moments and by the density of solitons close to some critical value. This state may be treated as the small-dispersion limit, what makes it possible to analytically estimate all high-order statistical moments. While the focus of the study is made on the Korteweg-de Vries equation and its modified version, a much broader applicability of the results to equations that support soliton-type solutions is discussed. Published under an exclusive license by AIP Publishing.