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Dynamics of vortex-antivortex pairs and rarefaction pulses in liquid light
David Feijoo1, Angel Paredes1, Humberto Michinel1
1Departamento de Física Aplicada, Universidade de Vigo, As Lagoas s/n, Ourense ES-32004, Spain.
Abstract:
We present a numerical study of the cubic-quintic nonlinear Schrödinger equation in two transverse dimensions, relevant for the propagation of light in certain exotic media. A well-known feature of the model is the existence of flat-top bright solitons of fixed intensity, whose dynamics resembles the physics of a liquid. They support traveling wave solutions, consisting of rarefaction pulses and vortex-antivortex pairs. In this work, we demonstrate how the vortex-antivortex pairs can be generated in bright soliton collisions displaying destructive interference followed by a snake instability. We then discuss the collisional dynamics of the dark excitations for different initial conditions. We describe a number of distinct phenomena including vortex exchange modes, quasielastic flyby scattering, solitonlike crossing, fully inelastic collisions, and rarefaction pulse merging.
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