Soliton gas in bidirectional dispersive hydrodynamics

Abstract: The theory of soliton gas had been previously developed for unidirectional integrable dispersive hydrodynamics in which the soliton gas properties are determined by the overtaking elastic pairwise interactions between solitons. In this paper, we extend this theory to soliton gases in bidirectional integrable Eulerian systems where both head-on and overtaking collisions of solitons take place. We distinguish between two qualitatively different types of bidirectional soliton gases: isotropic gases, in which the position shifts accompanying the head-on and overtaking soliton collisions have the same sign, and anisotropic gases, in which the position shifts for head-on and overtaking collisions have opposite signs. We construct kinetic equations for both types of bidirectional soliton gases and solve the respective shock-tube problems for the collision of two "monochromatic" soliton beams consisting of solitons of approximately the same amplitude and velocity. The corresponding weak solutions of the kinetic equations consisting of differing uniform states separated by contact discontinuities for the mean flow are constructed. Concrete examples of bidirectional Eulerian soliton gases for the defocusing nonlinear Schr\"odinger (NLS) equation and the resonant NLS equation are considered. The kinetic equation of the resonant NLS soliton gas is shown to be equivalent to that of the shallow-water bidirectional soliton gas described by the Kaup-Boussinesq equations. The analytical results for shock-tube Riemann problems for bidirectional soliton gases are shown to be in excellent agreement with direct numerical simulations.