Stable high-order solitons in spiral potentials

TL;DR

This paper investigates optical solitons in spiral potentials with cubic-quintic nonlinearity, revealing stable high-order states that could enable advanced optical trapping and data processing.

Contribution

It demonstrates the existence and stability of various high-order solitons in spiral potentials, a rare and significant finding in soliton physics.

Findings

All upper-branch nonlinear states are completely stable.

Various families of stationary states, including high-order ones, are identified.

Spiral potentials can be used for multistable optical trapping.

Abstract

We present a comprehensive study of optical solitons supported by spiral potentials in media with the cubic-quintic (CQ) nonlinearity. A variety of families of stationary states, including fundamental and high-order (excited) in-phase, out-of-phase, and hybrid-phase ones, are found. The linear stability analysis, corroborated by direct simulations, demonstrates that all upper-branch nonlinear states in potentials with different azimuthal indices are \emph{completely stable}, which rarely occurs in soliton physics. Our findings suggest spiral potentials as an effective means for multistable optical trapping, with potential applications in all-optical data processing.