Transverse instability of dark solitons in spin-orbit coupled polariton condensates

Abstract

We consider dark solitons and their stability in spin-orbit coupled polariton condensates. The system supports spinor solitons of two types: conventional (symmetric) dark solitons and asymmetric half-dark solitons. They demonstrate essentially different behavior upon variation of the strength of spin-orbit coupling. One-dimensional spin-orbit coupled dark solitons are usually unstable, while half-dark solitons can be stable. Two-dimensional dark solitons at early stages of the development of transverse instabilities turn into asymmetric snaking patterns and later into sets of vortex-antivortex solitons with notably different shapes. Depending on the sign of spin-orbit coupling two distinct instability scenarios are possible for such solitons, in which vortices in one component correspond to vortices or antivortices in other component. The decay of two-dimensional half-dark solitons results in the formation of half-vortex chains.

accepted for Optics Letters; typo fixed

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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Polariton gap and gap-stripe solitons in Zeeman lattices
• Transverse instability of hybrid solitons in the strong light-matter coupling regime