Collisions of non-explosive dissipative solitons can induce explosions

Collision dynamics between soliton molecules and a single soliton: exploding soliton pair and periodic soliton explosions

Inherent periodic collisions in dual-wavelength mode-locked fiber lasers (MLFLs) stimulate various intra-cavity collision dynamic phenomena. Analogous to the collision of matter particles, collisions between optical soliton molecules (SMs) and single solitons (SSs) have been observed by the real-time spectral measurements. It is demonstrated that the energy accumulation after the collision caused by internal motion within bound pulses leads to soliton pair (SP) explosions, while the periodic soliton explosions with another cavity parameter setting are almost unaffected by the collision. Additionally, the collision between a SP and a SS is reproduced through numerical simulations, and the collision-induced double Hopf-type bifurcation of SP is predicted. These findings provide novel insights, to the best of our knowledge, for further understanding the complex collision dynamics in dual-wavelength MLFLs and will help in the design of high-performance dual-comb sources.

Breaking of symmetry of interacting dissipative solitons can lead to partial annihilation

We show that for a large range of approach velocities and over a large interval of stabilizing cubic cross-coupling between counterpropagating waves, a collision of stationary pulses leads to a partial annihilation of pulses via a spontaneous breaking of symmetry. This result arises for coupled cubic-quintic complex Ginzburg-Landau equations for traveling waves for sufficiently large values of the stabilizing cubic cross-coupling and for large enough approach velocities of the pulses. Briefly, we show in addition that the collision of counterpropagating pulses in a system of two coupled cubic Ginzburg-Landau equations with nonlinear gradients (Raman effect) might also lead to partial annihilation, indicating that this breaking of symmetry is generic. Systems of experimental interest include surface reactions, convective onset, biosolitons, and nonlinear optics.

Logic gates on stationary dissipative solitons

Stable dissipative solitons are perfect carries of optical information due to remarkable stability of their waveforms that allows the signal transmission with extremely dense soliton packing without losing the encoded information. Apart from unaffected passing of solitons through a communication network, controllable transformations of soliton waveforms are needed to perform all-optical information processing. In this paper we employ the basic model of dissipative optical solitons in the form of the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation with a potential term to study the interactions between two stationary dissipative solitons under the control influences and use those interactions to implement various logic gates. In particular, we demonstrate not, and, nand, or, nor, xor, and xnor gates, where the plain (fundamental soliton) and composite pulses are used to represent the low and high logic levels.