Ubiquitous nonlinear waves in dispersive media include localized solitons and extended hydrodynamic states such as dispersive shock waves. Despite their physical prominence and the development of thorough theoretical and experimental investigations of each separately, experiments and a unified theory of solitons and dispersive hydrodynamics are lacking. Here, a general soliton-mean field theory is introduced and used to describe the propagation of solitons in macroscopic hydrodynamic flows. Two universal adiabatic invariants of motion are identified that predict trapping or transmission of solitons by hydrodynamic states. The result of solitons incident upon smooth expansion waves or compressive, rapidly oscillating dispersive shock waves is the same, an effect termed hydrodynamic reciprocity. Experiments on viscous fluid conduits quantitatively confirm the soliton-mean field theory with broader implications for nonlinear optics, superfluids, geophysical fluids, and other dispersive hydrodynamic media.

This paper presents a theoretical and experimental study of the long-standing fluid mechanics problem involving the temporal resolution of a large, localised initial disturbance into a sequence of solitary waves. This problem is of fundamental importance in a range of applications including tsunami and internal ocean wave modelling. This study is performed in the context of the viscous fluid conduit system-the driven, cylindrical, free interface between two miscible Stokes fluids with high viscosity contrast. Due to buoyancy induced nonlinear self-steepening balanced by stress induced interfacial dispersion, the disturbance evolves into a slowly modulated wavetrain and further, into a sequence of solitary waves. An extension of Whitham modulation theory, termed the solitary wave resolution method, is used to resolve the fission of an initial disturbance into solitary waves. The developed theory predicts the relationship between the initial disturbance's profile, the number of emergent solitary waves, and their amplitude distribution, quantifying an extension of the well-known soliton resolution conjecture from integrable systems to non-integrable systems that often provide a more accurate modelling of physical systems. The theoretical predictions for the fluid conduit system are confirmed both numerically and experimentally. The number of observed solitary waves is consistently within 1-2 waves of the prediction, and the amplitude distribution shows remarkable agreement. Universal properties of solitary wave fission in other fluid dynamics problems are identified.