Bright solitons from defocusing nonlinearities

Abstract

We report that defocusing cubic media with spatially inhomogeneous nonlinearity, whose strength increases rapidly enough toward the periphery, can support stable bright localized modes. Such nonlinearity landscapes give rise to a variety of stable solitons in all three dimensions, including one-dimensional fundamental and multihump states, two-dimensional vortex solitons with arbitrarily high topological charges, and fundamental solitons in three dimensions. Solitons maintain their coherence in the state of motion, oscillating in the nonlinear potential as robust quasiparticles and colliding elastically. In addition to numerically found soliton families, particular solutions are found in an exact analytical form, and accurate approximations are developed for the entire families, including moving solitons.