Families of Bragg-grating solitons in a cubic-quintic medium

Abstract

We investigate the existence and stability of solitons in an optical waveguide equipped with a Bragg grating (BG) in which nonlinearity contains both cubic and quintic terms. The model has straightforward realizations in both temporal and spatial domains, the latter being most realistic. Two different families of zero-velocity solitons, which are separated by a border at which solitons do not exist, are found in an exact analytical form. One family may be regarded as a generalization of the usual BG solitons supported by the cubic nonlinearity, while the other family, dominated by the quintic nonlinearity, includes novel ``two-tier'' solitons with a sharp (but nonsingular) peak. These soliton families also differ in the parities of their real and imaginary parts. A stability region is identified within each family by means of direct numerical simulations. The addition of the quintic term to the model makes the solitons very robust: simulating evolution of a strongly deformed pulse, we find that a larger part of its energy is \emph{retained} in the process of its evolution into a soliton shape, only a small share of the energy being lost into radiation, which is opposite to what occurs in the usual BG model with cubic nonlinearity.