Symmetry breaking with opposite stability between bifurcated asymmetric solitons in parity-time-symmetric potentials

Abstract

We report a new type of symmetry-breaking bifurcation of solitons in optical systems with parity-time-symmetric potentials. In this bifurcation, the two bifurcated branches of asymmetric solitons exhibit opposite stability, which contrasts all previous symmetry-breaking bifurcations in conservative and non-conservative systems. We show that this novel symmetry-breaking bifurcation can be exploited to achieve unidirectional propagation of high-intensity light beams in parity-time-symmetric potentials.

5 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Unidirectional Nonlinear PT-symmetric Optical Structures
• Symmetry breaking of solitons in one-dimensional parity-time-symmetric optical potentials
• Stable localized modes in asymmetric waveguides with gain and loss