Solitons in PT-symmetric ladders of optical waveguides

TL;DR

This paper investigates the existence, stability, and dynamics of solitons in PT-symmetric ladder-shaped optical waveguide arrays with Kerr nonlinearity, revealing conditions for their stability and instability regimes.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of soliton stability in PT-symmetric optical ladders, including new stability thresholds and the impact of gain-loss coupling on soliton behavior.

Findings

Site-centered in-phase solitons are stable below a certain amplitude threshold.

Antiphase solitons are stable above a critical amplitude in strongly-coupled chains.

Bond-centered solitons are unstable regardless of parameters.

Abstract

We consider a PT-symmetric ladder-shaped optical array consisting of a chain of waveguides with gain coupled to a parallel chain of waveguides with loss. All waveguides have the focusing Kerr nonlinearity. The array supports two co-existing solitons, an in-phase and an antiphase one, and each of these can be centred either on a lattice site or midway between two neighbouring sites. We show that both bond-centred (i.e. intersite) solitons are unstable regardless of their amplitudes and parameters of the chain. The site-centred in-phase soliton is stable when its amplitude lies below a threshold that depends on the coupling and gain-loss coefficient. The threshold is lowest when the gain-to-gain and loss-to-loss coupling constant in each chain is close to the interchain gain-to-loss coupling coefficient. The antiphase soliton in the strongly-coupled chain or in a chain close to the PT-symmetry breaking point, is stable when its amplitude lies above a critical value and unstable otherwise. The instability growth rate of solitons with small amplitude is exponentially small in this parameter regime; hence the small-amplitude solitons, though unstable, have exponentially long lifetimes. On the other hand, the antiphase soliton in the weakly or moderately coupled chain and away from the PT-symmetry breaking point, is unstable when its amplitude falls in one or two finite bands. All amplitudes outside those bands are stable.