 | This article may be too technical for most readers to understand. (January 2013) |
In optics, the term soliton is used to refer to any optical field that does not change during propagation because of a delicate balance between nonlinear and dispersive effects in the medium.[1] There are two main kinds of solitons:
- spatial solitons: the nonlinear effect can balance the dispersion. The electromagnetic field can change the refractive index of the medium while propagating, thus creating a structure similar to a graded-index fiber.[2] If the field is also a propagating mode of the guide it has created, then it will remain confined and it will propagate without changing its shape
- temporal solitons: if the electromagnetic field is already spatially confined, it is possible to send pulses that will not change their shape because the nonlinear effects will balance the dispersion. Those solitons were discovered first and they are often simply referred as "solitons" in optics.
- ^ Taylor, James Roy (1992). Optical solitons: theory and experiment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521405485. OCLC 23975147.
- ^ Rashidian Vaziri, M R (2013). "Describing the propagation of intense laser pulses in nonlinear Kerr media using the ducting model". Laser Physics. 23 (10): 105401. Bibcode:2013LaPhy..23j5401R. doi:10.1088/1054-660X/23/10/105401. S2CID 250912159.