Inelastic Interaction of Double-Valley Dark Solitons for the Hirota Equation

For a scalar integrable model, it is generally believed that the solitons interact with each other elastically, for instance, multi-bright solitons from the nonlinear Schrödinger equation and the Korteweg-de Vries equation, etc. We obtain double-valley dark solitons from the defocusing Hirota equation by the Darboux transformation. Particularly, we report a remarkable phenomenon for the inelastic interaction of the double-valley dark solitons, in contrast to the solitons interacting with each other elastically for a scalar integrable model in previous works. Furthermore, we give the explicit conditions for the elastic collision based on the asymptotic analysis results. It is shown that the double-valley dark solitons could also admit elastic interaction under the special parameters settings.