Mainz 2017 – scientific programme

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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik

Q 36: Photonics I

Q 36.6: Talk

Wednesday, March 8, 2017, 16:00–16:15, P 11

Solitons and loss: a new take at nonintegrability — •Christoph Mahnke, Alexander Hause, and Fedor Mitschke — Universität Rostock, Institut für Physik, Albert-Einstein-Str. 23, 18059 Rostock

Fiber-optic soliton pulses are described by the Nonlinear Schrödinger equation which is integrable. Integrability is an idealization, rendered invalid even by a minimal amount of loss (or gain). Attempts to assess the fate of the soliton in the lossy case have been restricted to perturbation analysis where it is assumed that the loss is very small. We present a new approach which is physically intuitive but does not make this last assumption. It can quantify the reshaping of the soliton, as well as the generation of linear radiation, for both localized and distributed loss. The perturbative limit is recovered as a special case. Outside this limit, we can quantitatively describe how the soliton eventually decays when it continuously loses energy. The approach can also be applied to the case of gain.