Interactions Between Solitons and Other Nonlinear Schr\"odinger Waves

TL;DR

This paper develops new methods to find interaction solutions between solitons and other nonlinear waves in the NLS equation, revealing potential applications in optics and wave physics.

Contribution

It introduces and applies symmetry reduction, Painlevé analysis, and tanh expansion methods to explicitly solve for soliton interactions with various nonlinear waves in the NLS system.

Findings

Soliton-cnoidal wave interactions are explicitly derived using elliptic functions.

Solitons can be accelerated or decelerated through interactions with background waves.

Elastic interactions with phase shifts suggest new optical routing mechanisms.

Abstract

The Nonlinear Schr\"odinger (NLS) equation is widely used in everywhere of natural science. Various nonlinear excitations of the NLS equation have been found by many methods. However, except for the soliton-soliton interactions, it is very difficult to find interaction solutions between different types of nonlinear excitations. In this paper, three very simple and powerful methods, the symmetry reduction method, the truncated Painlev\'e analysis and the generalized tanh function expansion approach, are further developed to find interaction solutions between solitons and other types of NLS waves. Especially, the soliton-cnoidal wave interaction solutions are explicitly studied in terms of the Jacobi elliptic functions and the third type of incomplete elliptic integrals. In addition to the new method and new solutions of the NLS equation, the results can unearth some new physics. The solitons may be decelerated/accelerated through the interactions of soliton with background waves which may be utilized to study tsunami waves and fiber soliton communications; the static/moving optical lattices may be automatically excited in all mediums described by the NLS systems; solitons elastically interact with non-soliton background waves, and the elastic interaction property with only phase shifts provides a new mechanism to produce a controllable routing switch that is applicable in optical information and optical communications.