Coherently coupled bright optical solitons and their collisions

TL;DR

This paper derives explicit bright soliton solutions for coherently coupled nonlinear Schrödinger equations, analyzing their collision dynamics and revealing unique elastic and switching behaviors.

Contribution

It introduces a non-standard Hirota's method to find explicit soliton solutions and studies their collision properties, highlighting novel interaction mechanisms.

Findings

Degenerate and non-degenerate solitons with various profiles are found.

Collisions among similar solitons are elastic.

Degenerate and non-degenerate soliton collisions exhibit switching behavior.

Abstract

We obtain explicit bright one- and two-soliton solutions of the integrable case of the coherently coupled nonlinear Schr{\"o}dinger equations by applying a non-standard form of the Hirota's direct method. We find that the system admits both degenerate and non-degenerate solitons in which the latter can take single hump, double hump, and flat-top profiles. Our study on the collision dynamics of solitons in the integrable case shows that the collision among degenerate solitons and also the collision of non-degenerate solitons are always standard elastic collisions. But the collision of a degenerate soliton with a non-degenerate soliton induces switching in the latter leaving the former unaffected after collision, thereby showing a different mechanism from that of the Manakov system.