Light Bullets in Nonlinear Periodically Curved Waveguide Arrays

TL;DR

This paper predicts and demonstrates the existence of stable, mobile spatio-temporal solitons, called light bullets, in nonlinear periodically curved waveguide arrays, enabling flexible optical pulse manipulation.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of stable, mobile light bullets in curved waveguide arrays, expanding the understanding of soliton dynamics in photonic lattices.

Findings

Stable light bullets can exist in curved waveguide arrays.

Light bullets are mobile across the arrays, unlike previously trapped discrete solitons.

Numerical simulations confirm the stability and mobility of these light bullets.

Abstract

We predict that stable mobile spatio-temporal solitons can exist in arrays of periodically curved optical waveguides. We find two-dimensional light bullets in one-dimensional arrays with harmonic waveguide bending and three-dimensional bullets in square lattices with helical waveguide bending using variational formalism. Stability of the light bullet solutions is confirmed by the direct numerical simulations which show that the light bullets can freely move across the curved arrays. This mobility property is a distinguishing characteristic compared to previously considered discrete light bullets which were trapped to a specific lattice site. These results suggest new possibilities for flexible spatio-temporal manipulation of optical pulses in photonic lattices.