Unbreakable PT-symmetry of solitons supported by inhomogeneous defocusing nonlinearity

Abstract

We consider bright solitons supported by a symmetric inhomogeneous defocusing nonlinearity growing rapidly enough toward the periphery of the medium, combined with an antisymmetric gain-loss profile. Despite the absence of any symmetric modulation of the linear refractive index, which is usually required to establish a PT-symmetry in the form of a purely real spectrum of modes, we show that the PT-symmetry is never broken in the present system, and that the system always supports stable bright solitons, fundamental and multi-pole ones. Such phenomenon is connected to non-linearizability of the underlying evolution equation. The increase of the gain-losses strength results, in lieu of the PT-symmetry breaking, in merger of pairs of different soliton branches, such as fundamental and dipole, or tripole and quadrupole ones. The fundamental and dipole solitons remain stable for all values of the gain-loss coefficient.

4 pages, 4 figures, to appear in Optics Letters

References in corpus (3)

• Unidirectional Nonlinear PT-symmetric Optical Structures
• Solitons in PT-symmetric nonlinear lattices
• Three-dimensional hybrid vortex solitons

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• Low-power optical bistability in $\mathcal{P}\mathcal{T}$-symmetric chirped Bragg gratings with four-wave mixing
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• Edge and bulk dissipative solitons in modulated PT-symmetric waveguide arrays
• Robust PT symmetry of two-dimensional fundamental and vortex solitons supported by spatially modulated nonlinearity
• Exact States in Waveguides With Periodically Modulated Nonlinearity