  Ultracold gases provide an unprecedented level of control for the
investigation of soliton dynamics and collisions. We present a scheme for
deterministically preparing pairs of three-component solitons in a
Bose-Einstein condensate. Our method is based on local spin rotations which
simultaneously imprint suitable phase and density distributions. This enables
us to observe striking collisional properties of the vector degree of freedom
which naturally arises for the coherent nature of the emerging multi-component
solitons. We find that the solitonic properties in the quasi-one-dimensional
system are quantitatively described by the integrable repulsive three-component
Manakov model.
