Surface Gap Solitons at a Nonlinearity Interface

We demonstrate existence of waves localized at the interface of two nonlinear periodic media with different coefficients of the cubic nonlinearity via the one-dimensional Gross–Pitaevsky equation. We call these waves the surface gap solitons (SGS). In the case of smooth symmetric periodic potentials, we study analytically bifurcations of SGS’s from standard gap solitons and determine numerically the maximal jump of the nonlinearity coefficient allowing for the SGS existence. We show that the maximal jump vanishes near the thresholds of bifurcations of gap solitons. In the case of continuous potentials with a jump in the first derivative at the interface, we develop a homotopy method of continuation of SGS families from the solution obtained via gluing of parts of the standard gap solitons and study existence of SGS’s in the photonic band gaps. We explain the termination of the SGS families in the interior points of the band gaps from the bifurcation of linear bound states in the continuous non-smooth potentials.