Interaction of soliton gases in deep-water surface gravity waves

Soliton gases represent large random soliton ensembles in physical systems that display integrable dynamics at leading order. We report hydrodynamic experiments in which we investigate the interaction between two beams or jets of soliton gases having nearly identical amplitudes but opposite velocities of the same magnitude. The space-time evolution of the two interacting soliton gas jets is recorded in a 140-m-long water tank where the dynamics is described at leading order by the focusing one-dimensional nonlinear Schrödinger equation. Varying the relative initial velocity of the two species of soliton gas, we change their interaction strength and we measure the macroscopic soliton gas density and velocity changes due to the interaction. Our experimental results are found to be in good quantitative agreement with predictions of the spectral kinetic theory of soliton gas despite the presence of perturbative higher-order effects that break the integrability of the wave dynamics.