Two-dimensional dispersion-managed light bullets in Kerr media

Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2004;70(1 Pt 2):016603. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.70.016603. Epub 2004 Jul 7.

Abstract

We propose a scheme for stabilizing spatiotemporal solitons (STSs) in media with cubic self-focusing nonlinearity and "dispersion management," i.e., a layered structure inducing periodically alternating normal and anomalous group-velocity dispersion. We develop a variational approximation for the STS, and verify results by direct simulations. A stability region for the two-dimensional (2D) STS (corresponding to a planar waveguide) is identified. At the borders between this region and that of decay of the solitons, a more sophisticated stable object, in the form of a periodically oscillating bound state of two subpulses, is also found. In the 3D case (bulk medium), all the spatiotemporal pulses spread out or collapse.