Breathers in PT-symmetric optical couplers

Abstract

We show that the parity-time (PT) symmetric coupled optical waveguides with gain and loss support localised oscillatory structures similar to the breathers of the classical ${\varphi }^4$ model. The power carried by the PT-breather oscillates periodically, switching back and forth between the waveguides, so that the gain and loss are compensated on the average. The breathers are found to coexist with solitons and be prevalent in the products of the soliton collisions. We demonstrate that the evolution of the small-amplitude breather's envelope is governed by a system of two coupled nonlinear Schrödinger equations, and employ this Hamiltonian system to show that the small-amplitude PT-breathers are stable.

14 pages; 11 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Making Sense of Non-Hermitian Hamiltonians
• Visualization of Branch Points in PT-Symmetric Waveguides
• Unidirectional Nonlinear PT-symmetric Optical Structures
• Physical realization of $\mathcal{P}\mathcal{T}$-symmetric potential scattering in a planar slab waveguide
• Solitons in PT-symmetric nonlinear lattices
• Exponentially Fragile PT-Symmetry in Lattices with Localized Eigenmodes
• PT-Symmetric Wave Chaos

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Symmetry breaking of solitons in one-dimensional parity-time-symmetric optical potentials
• Hamiltonian formulation of the standard $\mathcal{P}\mathcal{T}$-symmetric nonlinear Schrödinger dimer
• Solitons in PT-symmetric ladders of optical waveguides
• Interaction of sine-Gordon kinks and breathers with a $\mathcal{P}\mathcal{T}$-symmetric defect
• Light propagation in periodically modulated complex waveguides
• Generalized Dimers and their Stokes-variable Dynamics
• PT-symmetric sine-Gordon breathers
• Nonlinear stationary states in PT-symmetric lattices