Solitons Take Their Lumps in Two Dimensions
Solitons Take Their Lumps in Two Dimensions Solitons are solitary waves that travel like particles without changing shape. They have primarily been observed in settings where the underlying physics is 1D, such as along narrow water channels or inside thin optical fibers, but they can occur in higher dimensions as well. Davide Pierangeli from Sapienza University in Italy and his colleagues have used a structured light beam to become the first to produce a lump soliton, a mathematically exact soliton in two dimensions. Solitary waves are known to occur in higher dimensions, with the most familiar example being “rogue waves” in the ocean. But these waves are not “integrable” solitons, Pierangeli explains. By that he means they are not exact solutions to a nonlinear model describing the wave behavior. “Genuine solitons have an elegant mathematical formulation that makes their behavior deterministic,” he says. Thanks to this property, integrable solitons maintain their shapes and can ...