Asymptotic behavior of Manakov solitons: Effects of potential wells and humps

•The asymptotics of soliton solutions of the perturbed Manakov system is considered.•Three-soliton chains perturbed by sech-like external potentials are studied.•The Manakov system and the perturbed complex Toda chain are compared.•Perturbed complex Toda chain predicts the long-time evolution of the Manakov system.

We consider the asymptotic behavior of the soliton solutions of Manakov’s system perturbed by external potentials. It has already been established that its multisoliton interactions in the adiabatic approximation can be modeled by the complex Toda chain (CTC). The fact that the CTC is a completely integrable system, enables us to determine the asymptotic behavior of the multisoliton trains. In the present study we accent on the 3-soliton initial configurations perturbed by sech-like external potentials and compare the numerical predictions of the Manakov system and the perturbed CTC in different regimes. The results of conducted analysis show that the perturbed CTC can reliably predict the long-time evolution of the Manakov system.