N-soliton collision in the Manakov model

We investigate soliton collisions in the Manakov model, which is a system of coupled nonlinear Schroedinger equations that is integrable via the inverse scattering method. Computing the asymptotic forms of the general N-soliton solution in the limits $t \to \mp \infty$, we elucidate a mechanism that factorizes an N-soliton collision into a nonlinear superposition of $N \choose 2$ pair collisions with arbitrary order. This removes the misunderstanding that multi-particle effects exist in the Manakov model and provides a new ``set-theoretical'' solution to the quantum Yang-Baxter equation. As a by-product, we also obtain a new nontrivial relation among determinants and extended determinants.