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 Schrödinger 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.

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.

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.