We study interactions between bright matter-wave solitons which acquire chiral transport dynamics due to an optically-induced density-dependent gauge potential. Through numerical simulations, we find that the collision dynamics feature several non-integrable phenomena, from inelastic collisions including population transfer and radiation losses to the formation of short-lived bound states and soliton fission. An effective quasi-particle model for the interaction between the solitons is derived by means of a variational approximation, which demonstrates that the inelastic nature of the collision arises from a coupling of the gauge field to velocities of the solitons. In addition, we derive a set of interaction potentials which show that the influence of the gauge field appears as a short-range potential, that can give rise to both attractive and repulsive interactions.

We consider the linear stability of chiral matter-wave solitons described by a density-dependent gauge theory. By studying the associated Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations both numerically and analytically, we find that the stability problem effectively reduces to that of the standard Gross-Pitaevskii equation, proving that the solitons are stable to linear perturbations. In addition, we formulate the stability problem in the framework of the Vakhitov-Kolokolov criterion and provide supplementary numerical simulations which illustrate the absence of instabilities when the soliton is initially perturbed.