Spontaneous symmetry breaking induced by inhomogeneous nonlinearity in the coupled nonlinear Schrödinger equation

Abstract

We study solitons in the coupled nonlinear Schrödinger equation with a spatially modulated nonlinearity. In the model, only one component is under the influence of a spatially inhomogeneous nonlinearity, which for certain parameters induces the appearance of asymmetric solitons. Numerical simulations show that the coupling, total power and intensity of the nonlinearity have a significant influence on the spatial symmetry of soliton pairs. In general, increasing coupling strength, total power, and inhomogeneous self-attraction strength favor asymmetric solitons. In particular, we have checked the stability of the numerically obtained symmetric and asymmetric soliton pairs and analyzed the dynamic behavior of such pairs when subjected to abrupt changes in inhomogeneous nonlinearity.