We show that pairwise soliton collisions in N>2 intensity-coupled nonlinear Schrödinger equations can be reduced to pairwise soliton collisions in two coupled equations. The reduction applies to a wide class of systems, including the N-component Manakov system. This greatly simplifies the analysis of such systems and has important implications for the application of soliton collisions to all-op...

We introduce soliton percolation phenomena in the nonlinear transport of light packets in suitable optical lattices with random properties. Specifically, we address lattices with a gradient of the refractive index in the transverse plane, featuring stochastic phase or amplitude fluctuations, and we discover the existence of a disorder-induced transition between soliton insulator and soliton-con...

We predict new phenomena, such as soliton steering and soliton fission, in optical lattices that fade away exponentially along the propagation direction. Such lattices, featuring tunable decay rates, arise in photorefractive crystals in the wavelength range 360-400 nm. We show that the predicted phenomena offer different opportunities for soliton control.

Waveguiding in liquid crystals can be achieved by controlling the molecular orientation by means of external fields or by shaping the geometry of the substrates that contain the liquid crystal material. The creation of these waveguides in liquid crystals can also be achieved by using the optical nonlinear properties of the material. For a sufficient optical power (in the order of a few mW), the...

A dispersion-managed optical system with stepwise periodic variation of dispersion is studied in the framework of a path-averaged Gabitov-Turitsyn equation. The soliton solution is obtained by means of iterating the path-averaged equation. The dependence of soliton parameters on dispersion map strength is investigated, together with the oscillating tails of the soliton.

We present a brief overview of the basic concepts of the theory of spatial optical solitons, including the soliton stability in non-Kerr media, the instability-induced soliton dynamics, and collision of solitary waves in nonintegrable nonlinear models.

We propose a fibre-based approach for generation of optical frequency combs (OFC) with the aim of calibration of astronomical spectrographs in the low and medium-resolution range. This approach includes two steps: in the first step, an appropriate state of optical pulses is generated and subsequently moulded in the second step delivering the desired OFC. More precisely, the first step is realis...

The fast contraction, or pinching, of optical vortices in both thermal and Kerr self-defocusing media is investigated by numerical techniques. For the thermal case, heat diffusion across the vortex core is described, and the heretofore unexplained stability of optical-vortex solitons in thermal media is explained. © 2001 Optical Society of America OCIS codes: 190.4420, 190.5940, 190.3270, 160.4...

The group velocity dispersion (GVD) imposes severe limit on information carrying capacity of optical communication systems. By choosing appropriate pulse shape highly stable light pulses known as solitons are generated when effect of GVD is balanced by self-phase modulation (SPM). The application of solitons in communication systems opens the way to ultrahigh-speed information superhighways. Tr...