Real and virtual multidimensional solitons

Recently it has been shown that in two spatial and one temporal dimensions (2+1) there exist localized solitons. These coherent structures display a richer phenomenology than the one dimensional solitons. Different effects have been reported successively in a series of papers. Some of them are due to the fact that the soliton solution is structurally unstable with respect to special choices of the parameters. Also some quantum-like effects as the non conservation of the number of solitons have been discovered by using direct methods. This report is dedicated to the study of the origin and generality of these new effects in the context of the Spectral Transform (ST) theory. By choosing more general boundaries than those used in previous papers we derive an N2-soliton solution, which is parameterized by a point in a space of 4N(N+1) real parameters. Of these parameters 2N(N+2) are determined by the choice of the boundaries and fix the velocity and the possible location of the solitons in the plane at large times, while the remaining 2N govern the dynamics of the solitons during the interaction. The total mass of solitons is conserved but, in general, the mass of the single soliton is not preserved by the interaction. The extreme cases in which the masses of one or more solitons are zero at t = -∞ or/and t = +∞ are also allowed. We call these solitons with asymptotic zero masses and, consequently, with asymptotic zero amplitudes virtual solitons. The total momentum of solitons is not conserved because the boundaries act as external forces. Solitons can simulate inelastic scattering processes of quantum particles including creation and annihilation of particles