Breathers have been experimentally and theoretically found in many physical systems—in particular, in integrable nonlinear-wave models. A relevant problem is to study the breather gas, which is the limit, for \(N\rightarrow \infty \) , of N-breather solutions. In this paper, we investigate the breather gas in the framework of the focusing nonlinear Schrödinger (NLS) equation with nonzero boundary conditions, using the inverse scattering transform and Riemann–Hilbert problem. We address aggregate states in the form of N-breather solutions, when the respective discrete spectra are concentrated in specific domains. We show that the breather gas coagulates into a single-breather solution whose spectral eigenvalue is located at the center of the circle domain, and a multi-breather solution for the higher-degree quadrature concentration domain. These coagulation phenomena in the breather gas are called breather shielding. In particular, when the nonzero boundary conditions vanish, the breather gas reduces to an n-soliton solution. When the discrete eigenvalues are concentrated on a line, we derive the corresponding Riemann–Hilbert problem. When the discrete spectrum is uniformly distributed within an ellipse, it is equivalent to the case of the line domain. These results may be useful to design experiments with breathers in physical settings.
