New types of soliton solutions

We announce a detailed investigation of limits of N-soliton solutions of the Korteweg-deVries (KdV) equation as $N$ tends to infinity. Our main results provide new classes of KdV-solutions including in particular new types of soliton-like (reflectionless) solutions. As a byproduct we solve an inverse spectral problem for one-dimensional Schr\"odinger operators and explicitly construct smooth and real-valued potentials that yield a purely absolutely continuous spectrum on the nonnegative real axis and give rise to an eigenvalue spectrum that includes any prescribed countable and bounded subset of the negative real axis.