Stable high-order solitons in spiral potentials

Abstract

We present a comprehensive study of optical solitons supported by spiral potentials in media with the cubic-quintic (CQ) nonlinearity. A variety of families of stationary states, including fundamental and high-order (excited) in-phase, out-of-phase, and hybrid-phase ones, are found. The linear stability analysis, corroborated by direct simulations, demonstrates that all upper-branch nonlinear states in potentials with different azimuthal indices are \emph{completely stable}, which rarely occurs in soliton physics. Our findings suggest spiral potentials as an effective means for multistable optical trapping, with potential applications in all-optical data processing.

4 pages, 7 figures, to be published in Optics Letters