One- and two-dimensional solitons in PT-symmetric systems emulating the spin-orbit coupling

Abstract

We introduce a two-dimensional (2D) system, which can be implemented in dual-core planar optical couplers with the Kerr nonlinearity in its cores, making it possible to blend effects of the PT symmetry, represented by the balanced linear gain and loss in the two cores, and spin-orbit coupling (SOC), emulated by a spatially biased coupling between the cores. Families of 1D and 2D solitons and their stability boundaries are identified. In the 1D setting, the addition of the SOC terms leads, at first, to shrinkage of the stability area for PT-symmetric solitons, which is followed by its rapid expansion. 2D solitons have their stability region too, in spite of the simultaneous action of two major destabilizing factors, viz., the collapse driven by the Kerr nonlinearity, and a trend towards spontaneous breakup of the gain-loss balance. In the limit of the SOC terms dominating over the intrinsic diffraction, the 1D system gives rise to a new model for gap solitons, which admits exact analytical solutions.

New Journal of Physics, to be published (in a special issue "Focus on Parity-Time Symmetry in Optics and Photonics")

References in corpus (7)

• Making Sense of Non-Hermitian Hamiltonians
• Visualization of Branch Points in PT-Symmetric Waveguides
• Physical realization of $\mathcal{P}\mathcal{T}$-symmetric potential scattering in a planar slab waveguide
• The creation of two-dimensional composite solitons in spin-orbit-coupled self-attractive Bose-Einstein condensates in free space
• PT-Symmetric Talbot Effects
• Stable dark solitons in PT-symmetric dual-core waveguides
• Collapse of spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensates

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Two-dimensional dipolar gap solitons in free space with spin-orbit coupling
• Flipping-shuttle oscillations of bright one- and two-dimensional solitons in spin-orbit-coupled Bose-Einstein condensates with Rabi mixing
• Stabilization of one-dimensional Townes solitons by spin-orbit coupling in a dual-core system
• Solitons in $\mathcal{P}\mathcal{T}$-symmetric systems with spin-orbit coupling and critical nonlinearity
• Dragging spin-orbit-coupled solitons by a moving optical lattice