Odyssey of Light in Nonlinear Optical Fibers

9 Optical solitary modes pumped by localized gain

Boris A. Malomed

9.1 Introduction and Models

Spatial dissipative solitons (SDSs) are self-trapped beams of light [1–3] or plasmonic waves [4–12] propagating in planar or bulk waveguides. They result from the balance between diffraction and self-focusing (SF) nonlinearity, which is maintained simultaneously with the balance between the material loss and compensating gain. Due to their basic nature, SDSs are modes of profound significance to nonlinear photonics (optics and plasmonics), as concerns the fundamental studies and potential applications alike. In particular, a straightforward possibility is to use each sufficiently narrow SDS beam as a signal carrier in all-optical data-processing schemes. ...