Dissipative Nonlinear Josephson Junction of Optical Soliton and Surface Plasmon

TL;DR

This paper investigates the dynamics of a dissipative photonic Josephson junction involving optical solitons and surface plasmons, revealing phase-slip phenomena and bifurcations influenced by dissipation mechanisms.

Contribution

It introduces a heuristic model for the dissipative photonic Josephson junction and analyzes the effects of two dissipation mechanisms on system dynamics and bifurcations.

Findings

Phase-slip phenomena observed with angular velocity dissipation.

Hopf bifurcations lead to stable limit cycles.

Dissipation mechanisms significantly alter phase-space dynamics.

Abstract

We examine the dynamics of a dissipative photonic Josephson junction formed by the weak coupling of an optical soliton in a nonlinear dielectric waveguide and a co-propagating surface plasmon along a parallel metal surface with a linear dielectric spacer. We employ a heuristic model with a coupling function that depends on the soliton amplitude, and consider two phenomenological dissipation mechanisms separately: angular velocity dissipation and population imbalance dissipation. In the former dissipation mechanism, the system exhibits phase-slip phenomenon where the odd-\pi phase modes decay into even-\pi phase modes. The latter damping mechanism sculptures the phase-space significantly by introducing complex features, among which Hopf type bifurcations are notable. We show that some of the bifurcation points expand to stable limit cycles for certain regimes of the model parameters.