Soliton Decomposition of the Box-Ball System

Abstract The box-ball system (BBS) was introduced by Takahashi and Satsuma as a discrete counterpart of the Korteweg-de Vries equation. Both systems exhibit solitons whose shape and speed are conserved after collision with other solitons. We introduce a slot decomposition of ball configurations, each component being an infinite vector describing the number of size k solitons in each k-slot. The dynamics of the components is linear: the kth component moves rigidly at speed k. Let $\zeta $ be a translation-invariant family of independent random vectors under a summability condition and $\eta $ be the ball configuration with components $\zeta $ . We show that the law of $\eta $ is translation invariant and invariant for the BBS. This recipe allows us to construct a large family of invariant measures, including product measures and stationary Markov chains with ball density less than $\frac {1}{2}$ . We also show that starting BBS with an ergodic measure, the position of a tagged k-soliton at time t, divided by t converges as $t\to \infty $ to an effective speed $v_k$ . The vector of speeds satisfies a system of linear equations related with the generalised Gibbs ensemble of conservative laws. Abstract BBS dynamics for independent and identically distributed initial configuration with density 0.25. Time is going down. Straight red lines are deterministic and computed using Theorem 1.2. (High resolution, color online.)