Limits of soliton solutions (Q1202448)

The authors consider the \(N\)-soliton solution to the Korteweg-de Vries equation in the limit \(N \to \infty\) by careful investigation of the spectral and scattering properties of the Schrödinger operator associated to the KdV equation by the inverse scattering transform. The methods of the paper are applicable to general integrable systems such as the AKNS-class, the Toda lattice, and the Kadomtsev-Petviashvili equation.