Dark solitons and vortices in PT-symmetric nonlinear media: from spontaneous symmetry breaking to nonlinear PT phase transitions

By V. Achilleos, Panayotis G. Kevrekidis, Dimitri J. Frantzeskakis, R. Carretero-González. 2012

149 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We consider nonlinear analogs of parity-time- (PT-) symmetric linear systems exhibiting defocusing nonlinearities. We study the ground state and odd excited states (dark solitons and vortices) of the system and report the following remarkable features. For relatively weak values of the parameter e controlling the strength of the PT-symmetric potential, excited states undergo (analytically tractable) spontaneous symmetry breaking; as e is further increased, the ground state and first excited state, as well as branches of higher multisoliton (multivortex) states, collide in pairs and disappear in blue-sky bifurcations, in a way which is strongly reminiscent of the linear PT phase transition—thus termed the nonlinear PT phase transition. Past this critical point, initialization of, e.g., the former ground state, leads to spontaneously emerging solitons and vortices.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b80df874adbc93fdb8e6d1bba8ce5ec91d851a5c

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

Citations in the corpus

Nonlinear waves in PT -symmetric systems (2016, background): “Such collisions were observed in the PT -symmetric potential (134) with V0 = 0 and varying values of γ at a fixed propagation constant (Achilleos et al., 2012) [see Fig.”
(INVITED) Vortex solitons: Old results and new perspectives (2019, background): “Stable “dark” vortices in a PT -symmetric medium, supported by a finite-amplitude background field, were studied too [301].”