Spatiotemporal solitary modes in a twisted cylinder waveguide pipe with the self-focusing Kerr nonlinearity

TL;DR

This paper investigates the existence, stability, and interactions of spatiotemporal solitary modes in a twisted cylindrical waveguide with Kerr nonlinearity, revealing new types of modes and their potential for emulating spin-orbit coupling effects.

Contribution

It introduces and analyzes new zero- and first-harmonic solitary modes in a twisted waveguide, including their stability, bistability, and potential for optical emulation of spin-orbit coupling.

Findings

Zero-harmonic modes are quasi-1D temporal solitons dependent on energy flow.

First-harmonic modes are quasi-2D bullets influenced by energy flow and waveguide rotation.

Stable first-harmonic modes exist below the Townes soliton norm threshold.

Abstract

We study the spatiotemporal solitary modes that propagate in a hollow twisted cylinder waveguide pipe with a self-focusing Kerr nonlinearity. Three generic solitary modes, one belonging to the zero-harmonic (0H) and the other two belonging to the first-harmonic (1H), are found in the first rotational Brillouin zone. The 0H solitary modes can be termed as a quasi-1D (one-dimensional) temporal soliton. Their characteristics depend only on the energy flow. The 1H solitary mode can be termed a quasi-2D (two-dimensional) bullet, whose width is much narrower than the angular domain of the waveguide. In contrast to the 0H mode, the characteristics of the 1H solitary mode depend on both their energy flow and the rotating speed of the waveguide. We demonstrate numerically that the 1H solitary modes are stable when their energy flow is smaller than the threshold norm of the \emph{Townes soliton}. The boundaries of the bistable area for these two types of solitary modes are predicted by the analyses via two-mode approximation. This prediction is in accordance with the numerical findings. We also demonstrate analytically that the 1H solitary mode of this system can be applied to emulate the nonlinear dynamics of solitary modes with 1D Rashba spin-orbit (SO) coupling by optics. Two degenerated states of the 1H solitary mode, semi-dipole and mixed mode, are found from this setting via the mechanism of SO coupling. Collisions between the pair of these two types of solitary modes are also discussed in the paper. The pair of the 0H solitary mode features only the elastic collision, whereas the pair of 1H solitary modes can feature both elastic and inelastic collision when the total energy flow of the two modes are smaller or close to the threshold norm of the \emph{Townes soliton}.