Breather solitons in highly nonlocal media

We reveal that lattice interfaces imprinted in nonlocal nonlinear media support surface solitons that do not exist in other similar settings, including interfaces of local and nonlocal uniform materials. We show the impact of nonlocality on the domains of existence and stability of the surface solitons, focusing on new types of dipole solitons residing partially inside the optical lattice. We find that such solitons feature strongly asymmetric shapes and that they are stable ...

Solitons and breathers are nonlinear modes that exist in a wide range of physical systems. They are fundamental solutions of a number of nonlinear wave evolution equations, including the uni-directional nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation (NLSE). We report the observation of slanted solitons and breathers propagating at an angle with respect to the direction of propagation of the wave field. As the coherence is diagonal, the scale in the crest direction becomes finite, consequen...

We address spectral tunneling of walking spatial solitons in photorefractive media with nonlocal diffusion of the nonlinear response and an imprinted shallow optical lattice. In contrast to materials with local nonlinearities, where solitons travelling across the lattice close to the Bragg angle suffer large radiative losses, in photorefractive media with diffusion nonlinearity resulting in self-bending solitons survive when their propagation angle approaches and even exceeds...

We predict that spatial self-trapping of light can occur in soft matter encompassing a wide class of new materials such as colloids, foams, gels, fractal aggregates etc. We develop a general nonlocal theory that allows to relate the properties of the trapped state of Maxwell equations to the measurable static structure factor of the specific material. We give numerical evidence for stable trapping in fractal aggregates and suggest also the possibility of soliton spectroscopy ...

We discuss differences between the variational approach to solitons and the accessible soliton approximaion in a highly nonlocal nonlinear medium. We compare results of both approximations by considering the same system of equations in the same spatial region, under the same boundary conditions. We also compare these approximations with the numerical solution of the equations. We find that the variational highly nonlocal approximation provides more accurate results and as suc...

The generation of temporal cavity solitons in microresonators results in low-noise optical frequency combs which are critical for applications in spectroscopy, astronomy, navigation or telecommunications. Breather solitons also form an important part of many different classes of nonlinear wave systems with a localized temporal structure that exhibits oscillatory behavior. To date, the dynamics of breather solitons in microresonators remains largely unexplored, and its experim...

Dispersive shock waves are fascinating phenomena occurring when nonlinearity overwhelms linear effects, such as dispersion and diffraction. Many features of shock waves are still under investigation, as the interplay with noninstantaneity in temporal pulses transmission and nonlocality in spatial beams propagation. Despite the rich and vast literature on nonlinear waves in optical Kerr media, spatial dispersive shock waves in nonlocal materials deserve further attention for...

The data recorded in optical fiber [1] and in hydrodynamic [2] experiments reported the pioneering observation of nonlinear waves with spatiotemporal localization similar to the Peregrine soliton are examined by using nonlinear spectral analysis. Our approach is based on the integrable nature of the one-dimensional focusing nonlinear Schrodinger equation (1D-NLSE) that governs at leading order the propagation of the optical and hydrodynamic waves in the two experiments. Nonli...

The phenomenon of dynamical localization of matter wave solitons in optical lattices is first demonstrated and the conditions for its existence are discussed. In addition to the trapping linear periodic potential we use a periodic modulation of the nonlinearity in space to eliminate nonexistence regions of gap-solitons in reciprocal space. We show that when this condition is achieved, the observation of dynamical localization in true nonlinear regime becomes possible. The res...

We reveal the existence of slowly-decaying dark solitons in the radiation build-up dynamics of bright pulses in all-normal dispersion mode-locked fiber lasers, numerically modeled in the framework of a generalized nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation. The evolution of noise perturbations to quasi-stationary dark solitons is examined, and the significance of background shape and soliton-soliton collisions on the eventual soliton decay is established. We demonstrate the role of a r...