Quasinormal Modes of Optical Solitons

TL;DR

This paper explores the quasinormal modes of optical solitons, deriving analytical expressions and revealing analogies with black hole physics, with implications for optical pulse stability and black hole simulations.

Contribution

It is the first study to analyze QNMs of optical potentials, providing exact solutions and establishing a novel analogy between solitons and black holes.

Findings

Solitons can support quasinormal modes.

Derived exact analytical expressions for QNMs of fiber solitons.

Identified signatures of dispersion and black hole analogies.

Abstract

Quasinormal modes (QNMs) are essential for understanding the stability and resonances of open systems, with increasing prominence in black hole physics. We present here the first study of QNMs of optical potentials. We show that solitons can support QNMs, deriving a soliton perturbation equation and giving exact analytical expressions for the QNMs of fiber solitons. We discuss the boundary conditions in this intrinsically dispersive system and identify novel signatures of dispersion. From here, we discover a new analogy with black holes and describe a regime in which the soliton is a robust black hole simulator for light-ring phenomena. Our results invite a range of applications, from the description of optical pulse propagation with QNMs to the use of state-of-the-art technology from fiber optics to address questions in black hole physics, such as QNM spectral instabilities and the role of nonlinearities in ringdown.