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Complex solitons with real energies

Using Hirota's direct method and Baecklund transformations we construct explicit complex one and two-solutions to the complex Korteweg-de Vries equation, the complex modified Korteweg-de Vries equation and the complex sine-Gordon equation. The one-soliton solutions of trigonometric and elliptic type turn out to be PT-symmetric when a constant of integration is chosen to be purely imaginary with one special choice corresponding to solutions recently found by Khare and Saxena. We show that alternatively complex PT-symmetric solutions to the Korteweg-de Vries equation may also be constructed alternatively from real solutions to the modified Korteweg-de Vries by means of Miura transformations. The multi-soliton solutions obtained from Hirota's method break the PT-symmetric, whereas those obtained from Baecklund transformations are PT-invariant under certain conditions. Despite the fact that some of the Hamiltonian densities are non-Hermitian, the total energy is found to be positive in all cases, that is irrespective of whether they are PT-symmetric or not. The reason is that the symmetry can be restored by suitable shifts in space-time and the fact that any of our N-soliton solutions may be decomposed into N separate PT-symmetrizable one-soliton solutions.