We use the spectral theory of soliton gas for the one-dimensional focusing nonlinear Schrödinger equation (fNLSE) to describe the statistically stationary and spatially homogeneous integrable turbulence emerging at large times from the evolution of the spontaneous (noise-induced) modulational instability of the elliptic “dn” fNLSE solutions. We show that a special, critically dense, soliton gas, namely the genus one bound-state soliton condensate, represents an accurate model of the asymptotic state of the “elliptic” integrable turbulence. This is done by first analytically evaluating the relevant spectral density of states which is then used for implementing the soliton condensate numerically via a random N-soliton ensemble with N large. A comparison of the statistical parameters, such as the Fourier spectrum, the probability density function of the wave intensity, and the autocorrelation function of the intensity, of the soliton condensate with the results of direct numerical fNLSE simulations with dn initial data augmented by a small statistically uniform random perturbation (a noise) shows a remarkable agreement. Additionally, we analytically compute the kurtosis of the elliptic integrable turbulence, which enables one to estimate the deviation from Gaussianity. The analytical predictions of the kurtosis values, including the frequency of its temporal oscillations at the intermediate stage of the modulational instability development, are also shown to be in excellent agreement with numerical simulations for the entire range of the elliptic parameter m of the initial dn potential.

Breather solutions are considered to be generally accepted models of rogue waves. However, breathers are not localized, while wavefields in nature can generally be considered as localized due to the limited spatial dimensions. Hence, the theory of rogue waves needs to be supplemented with localized solutions which evolve locally as breathers. In this paper, we present a universal method for constructing such solutions from exact multi-soliton solutions, which consists in replacing the plane wave in the dressing construction of the breathers with a specific exact $N$-soliton solution converging asymptotically to the plane wave at large number of solitons $N$. On the example of the Peregrine, Akhmediev, Kuznetsov-Ma and Tajiri-Watanabe breathers, we show that the constructed with our method multi-soliton solutions, being localized in space with characteristic width proportional to $N$, are practically indistinguishable from the breathers in a wide region of space and time at large $N$. Our method makes it possible to build solitonic models with the same dynamical properties for the higher-order rational and super-regular breathers, and can be applied to general multi-breather solutions, breathers on a nontrivial background (e.g., cnoidal waves) and other integrable systems. The constructed multi-soliton solutions can also be generalized to capture the spontaneous emergence of rogue waves through the spontaneous synchronization of soliton norming constants, though finding these synchronizations conditions represents a challenging problem for future studies.

The concept of soliton gas was introduced in 1971 by V. Zakharov as an infinite collection of weakly interacting solitons in the framework of Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation. In this theoretical construction of a diluted soliton gas, solitons with random parameters are almost non-overlapping. More recently, the concept has been extended to dense gases in which solitons strongly and continuously interact. The notion of soliton gas is inherently associated with integrable wave systems described by nonlinear partial differential equations like the KdV equation or the one-dimensional nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation that can be solved using the inverse scattering transform. Over the last few years, the field of soliton gases has received a rapidly growing interest from both the theoretical and experimental points of view. In particular, it has been realized that the soliton gas dynamics underlies some fundamental nonlinear wave phenomena such as spontaneous modulation instability and the formation of rogue waves. The recently discovered deep connections of soliton gas theory with generalized hydrodynamics have broadened the field and opened new fundamental questions related to the soliton gas statistics and thermodynamics. We review the main recent theoretical and experimental results in the field of soliton gas. The key conceptual tools of the field, such as the inverse scattering transform, the thermodynamic limit of finite-gap potentials and the Generalized Gibbs Ensembles are introduced and various open questions and future challenges are discussed.

We study numerically the integrable turbulence in the framework of the one-dimensional nonlinear Schrodinger equation (1D-NLSE) of the focusing type using a new approach called the “growing of turbulence”. In this approach, we add a small linear pumping term to the equation and start evolution from statistically homogeneous Gaussian noise. After reaching a certain level of average intensity, we switch off the pumping and examine the resulting integrable turbulence. For sufficiently small initial noise and pumping coefficient, and also for not very wide simulation box (basin length), we observe that the turbulence grows in a universal adiabatic regime, moving successively through the statistically stationary states of the integrable 1D-NLSE, which do not depend on the pumping coefficient, amplitude of the initial noise or basing length. Waiting longer in the growth stage, we transit from weakly nonlinear states to strongly nonlinear ones, characterized by a high frequency of rogue waves. Using the inverse scattering transform (IST) method to monitor the evolution, we observe that the solitonic part of the wavefield becomes dominant even when the (linear) dispersion effects are still leading in the dynamics and with increasing average intensity the wavefield approaches a dense bound-state soliton gas, whose properties are defined by the Fourier spectrum of the initial noise. Regimes deviating from the universal adiabatic growth also lead to solitonic states, but solitons in these states have noticeably different velocities and a significantly wider distribution by amplitude, while the statistics of wavefield indicates a much more frequent appearance of very large waves.

We study the formation of quasi-two-dimensional (thin pancake) vortex structures in three-dimensional flows and of quasi-one-dimensional structures in two-dimensional hydrodynamics. These structures are formed at large Reynolds numbers, when their evolution is described in the leading order by the Euler equations for an ideal incompressible fluid. We show numerically and analytically that the compression of these structures and, as a consequence, the increase in their amplitudes are due to the compressibility of the frozen-in-fluid fields: the field of continuously distributed vortex lines in the three-dimensional case and the field of vorticity rotor lines (divorticity) for two-dimensional flows. We find that the growth of vorticity and divorticity can be considered to be a process of overturning the corresponding fields. At high intensities, this process demonstrates a Kolmogorov-type scaling relating the maximum amplitude to the corresponding thicknesses-to-width ratio of the structures. The possible role of these coherent structures in the formation of the Kolmogorov turbulent spectrum, as well as in the Kraichnan spectrum corresponding to a constant flux of enstrophy in the case of two-dimensional turbulence, is analyzed.

In this brief report we study numerically the spontaneous emergence of rogue waves in 1) modulationally unstable plane wave at its long-time statistically stationary state and 2) bound-state multi-soliton solutions representing the solitonic model of this state. Focusing our analysis on the cohort of the largest rogue waves, we find their practically identical dynamical and statistical properties for both systems, that strongly suggests that the main mechanism of rogue wave formation for the modulational instability case is multi-soliton interaction. Additionally, we demonstrate that most of the largest rogue waves are very well approximated–simultaneously in space and in time–by the amplitude-scaled rational breather solution of the second order.

We consider a spatially extended box-shaped wave field that consists of a plane wave (the condensate) in the middle and equals zero at the edges, in the framework of the focusing one-dimensional nonlinear Schrodinger equation. Within the inverse scattering transform theory, the scattering data for this wave field is presented by the continuous spectrum of the nonlinear radiation and the soliton eigenvalues together with their norming constants; the number of solitons N is proportional to the box width. We remove the continuous spectrum from the scattering data and find analytically the specific corrections to the soliton norming constants that arise due to the removal procedure. The corrected soliton parameters correspond to symmetric in space N-soliton solution, as we demonstrate analytically in the paper. Generating this solution numerically for N up to 1024, we observe that, at large N, it converges asymptotically to the condensate, representing its solitonic model. Our methods can be generalized for other strongly nonlinear wave fields, as we demonstrate for the hyperbolic secant potential, building its solitonic model as well.

In the framework of the focusing one-dimensional nonlinear Schrödinger equation, we study numerically the integrable turbulence developing from partially coherent waves (PCW), which represent superposition of uncorrelated linear waves. The long-time evolution from these initial conditions is characterized by emergence of rogue waves with heavy-tailed (non-Gaussian) statistics, and, as was established previously, the stronger deviation from Gaussianity (i.e., the higher frequency of rogue waves) is observed for narrower initial spectrum. We investigate the fundamental limiting case of very narrow initial spectrum and find that shortly after the beginning of motion the turbulence enters a quasistationary state (QSS), which is characterized by a very slow evolution of statistics and lasts for a very long time before arrival at the asymptotic stationary state. In the beginning of the QSS, the probability density function (PDF) of intensity turns out to be nearly independent of the initial spectrum and is very well approximated by a certain Bessel function that represents an integral of the product of two exponential distributions. The PDF corresponds to the maximum possible stationary value of the fourth-order moment of amplitude κ_{4}=4 and yields a probability to meet intensity above the rogue wave threshold that is higher by 1.5 orders of magnitude than that for a random superposition of linear waves. We routinely observe rogue waves with amplitudes ten times larger than the average one, and all of the largest waves that we have studied are very well approximated by the amplitude-scaled rational breather solutions of either the first (Peregrine breather) or the second orders.

We study numerically the integrable turbulence developing from strongly nonlinear partially coherent waves, in the framework of the focusing one-dimensional nonlinear Schrodinger equation. We find that shortly after the beginning of motion the turbulence enters a state characterized by a very slow evolution of statistics (the quasi-stationary state - QSS), and we concentrate on the detailed examination of the basic statistical functions in this state depending on the shape and the width of the initial spectrum. In particular, we show that the probability density function (PDF) of wavefield intensity is nearly independent of the initial spectrum and is very well approximated by a certain Bessel function representing an integral of the product of two exponential distributions. The PDF corresponds to the value of the second-order moment of intensity equal to 4, indicating enhanced generation of rogue waves. All waves of large amplitude that we have studied are very well approximated - both in space and in time - by the rational breather solutions of either the first (the Peregrine breather), or the second orders.

We study numerically the integrable turbulence in the framework of the focusing one-dimensional nonlinear Schrodinger equation using a new method - the "growing of turbulence". We add to the equation a weak controlled pumping term and start adiabatic evolution of turbulence from statistically homogeneous Gaussian noise. After reaching a certain level of average intensity, we switch off the pumping and realize that the "grown up" turbulence is statistically stationary. We measure its Fourier spectrum, the probability density function (PDF) of intensity and the autocorrelation of intensity. Additionally, we show that, being adiabatic, our method produces stationary states of the integrable turbulence for the intermediate moments of pumping as well. Presently, we consider only the turbulence of relatively small level of nonlinearity; however, even this "moderate" turbulence is characterized by enhanced generation of rogue waves.

We study the statistical correlation functions for the three-dimensional hydrodynamic turbulence onset when the dynamics is dominated by the pancake-like high-vorticity structures. With extensive numerical simulations, we systematically examine the two-points structure functions (moments) of velocity. We observe formation of the power-law scaling for both the longitudinal and the transversal moments in the same interval of scales as for the energy spectrum. The scaling exponents for the velocity structure functions demonstrate the same key properties as for the stationary turbulence case. In particular, the exponents depend on the order of the moment non-trivially, indicating the intermittency and the anomalous scaling, and the longitudinal exponents turn out to be slightly larger than the transversal ones. When the energy spectrum has power-law scaling close to the Kolmogorov’s one, the longitudinal third-order moment shows close to linear scaling with the distance, in line with the Kolmogorov’s 4/5-law despite the strong anisotropy.

Despite the numerous studied devoted to the so-called Modulational Instability (MI) in optical fibers, it is only recently that the single-shot observation of MI spontaneously emerging from noise has been reported. In particular, in [1], MI arising from the propagation of a continuous wave (CW) field in optical fibers is investigated by using time-lens technique. However, in these pioneering studies, the detection performed at the output of the fiber does not allow the observation of the dynamics along the propagation inside the fiber.

We present an optical fiber experiment in which we examine the space-time evolution of a modulationally unstable plane wave initially perturbed by a small noise. Using a recirculating fiber loop as an experimental platform, we report the single-shot observation of the noise-driven development of breather structures from the early stage to the long-term evolution of modulation instability. Performing single-point statistical analysis of optical power recorded in the experiments, we observe decaying oscillations of the second-order moment together with the exponential distribution in the long-term evolution, as predicted by Agafontsev and Zakharov [Nonlinearity 28, 2791 (2015).NONLE50951-771510.1088/0951-7715/28/8/2791]. Finally, we demonstrate experimentally and numerically that the autocorrelation of the optical power g^{(2)}(τ) exhibits some unique oscillatory features typifying the nonlinear stage of the noise-driven modulation instability and of integrable turbulence.

The formation of the coherent vortical structures in the form of thin pancakes is studied for three-dimensional flows at the high Reynolds regime when, in the leading order, the development of such structures can be described within the 3D Euler equations for ideal incompressible fluids. Numerically and analytically on the base of the vortex line representation we show that compression of such structures and respectively increase of their amplitudes are possible due to the compressibility of the continuously distributed vortex lines. It is demonstrated that this growth can be considered as analog of breaking for the divergence-free vorticity field. At high amplitudes this process has a self-similar behavior connected the maximal vorticity and the pancake width by the Kolmogorov type relation omega(max) proportional to l(-2/3). The role of such structures in the Kolmogorov spectrum formation is also discussed.

We investigate the fundamental phenomenon of the spontaneous, noise-induced modulational instability (MI) of a plane wave. The statistical properties of the noise-induced MI, observed previously in numerical simulations and in experiments, have not been explained theoretically. In this Letter, using the inverse scattering transform (IST) formalism, we propose a theoretical model of the asymptotic stage of the noise-induced MI based on N-soliton solutions of the focusing one-dimensional nonlinear Schrödinger equation. Specifically, we use ensembles of N-soliton bound states having a special semiclassical distribution of the IST eigenvalues, together with random phases for norming constants. To verify our model, we employ a recently developed numerical approach to construct an ensemble of N-soliton solutions with a large number of solitons, N∼100. Our investigation reveals a remarkable agreement between spectral (Fourier) and statistical properties of the long-term evolution of the MI and those of the constructed multisoliton, random-phase bound states. Our results can be generalized to a broad class of strongly nonlinear integrable turbulence problems.

We study numerically the properties of (statistically) homogeneous soliton gas depending on soliton density (proportional to number of solitons per unit length) and soliton velocities, in the framework of the focusing one-dimensional nonlinear Schrodinger (NLS) equation. To model such gas we use N-soliton solutions (N-SS) with N similar to 100, which we generate with specific implementation of the dressing method combined with 100-digits arithmetics. We examine the major statistical characteristics, in particular the kinetic and potential energies, the kurtosis, the wave-action spectrum and the probability density function (PDF) of wavefield intensity. We show that in the case of small soliton density the kinetic and potential energies, as well as the kurtosis, are very well described by the analytical relations derived without taking into account soliton interactions. With increasing soliton density and velocities, soliton interactions enhance, and we observe increasing deviations from these relations leading to increased absolute values for all of these three characteristics. The wave-action spectrum is smooth, decays close to exponentially at large wavenumbers and widens with increasing soliton density and velocities. The PDF of wave intensity deviates from the exponential (Rayleigh) PDF drastically for rarefied soliton gas, transforming much closer to it at densities corresponding to essential interaction between the solitons. Rogue waves emerging in soliton gas are multisoliton collisions, and yet some of them have spatial profiles very similar to those of the Peregrine solutions of different orders. We present example of three-soliton collision, for which even the temporal behavior of the maximal amplitude is very well approximated by the Peregrine solution of the second order.

The incompressible three-dimensional Euler equations develop very thin pancake-like regions of increasing vorticity. These regions evolve with the scaling ωmax ∝ l−2/3 between the vorticity maximum and the pancake thickness, as was observed in the recent numerical experiments [D. S. Agafontsev et al., “Development of high vorticity structures in incompressible 3D Euler equations,” Phys. Fluids 27, 085102 (2015)]. We study the process of pancakes’ development in terms of the vortex line representation (VLR), which represents a partial integration of the Euler equations with the explicit conservation of the Cauchy invariants and describes the compressible dynamics of continuously distributed vortex lines. We present, for the first time, the numerical simulations of the VLR equations with high accuracy, which we perform in adaptive anisotropic grids of up to 15363 nodes. With these simulations, we show that the vorticity growth is connected with the compressibility of the vortex lines and find geometric properties responsible for the observed scaling ωmax ∝ l−2/3.