Observation and analysis of creation, decay, and regeneration of annular soliton clusters in a lossy cubic-quintic optical medium

TL;DR

This study demonstrates the formation, decay, and regeneration of annular soliton clusters in a lossy cubic-quintic optical medium, combining experimental observations with numerical modeling to understand their stability and dynamics.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of the creation, decay, and spontaneous regeneration of ring-shaped soliton clusters in a dissipative nonlinear medium.

Findings

Stable annular soliton clusters last for ~17.5 Rayleigh lengths.

Clusters are generated by azimuthal modulational instability from vortex beams.

Regeneration occurs due to power transfer from the parent vortex ring.

Abstract

We observe and analyze formation, decay, and subsequent regeneration of ring-shaped clusters of (2+1)-dimensional spatial solitons (filaments) in a medium with the cubic-quintic (focusing-defocusing) self-interaction and strong dissipative nonlinearity. The cluster of filaments, that remains stable over ~17.5 Rayleigh lengths, is produced by the azimuthal modulational instability from a parent ring-shaped beam with embedded vorticity l = 1. In the course of still longer propagation, the stability of the soliton cluster is lost under the action of nonlinear losses. The annular cluster is then spontaneously regenerated due to power transfer from the reservoir provided by the unsplit part of the parent vortex ring. A (secondary) interval of the robust propagation of the regenerated cluster is identified. The experiments use a laser beam (at wavelength 800 nm), built of pulses with temporal duration 150 fs, at the repetition rate of 1 kHz, propagating in a cell filled by liquid carbon disulfide. Numerical calculations, based on a modified nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation which includes the cubic-quintic refractive terms and nonlinear losses, provide results in close agreement with the experimental findings.