Asymmetrical splitting of higher-order optical solitons induced by quintic nonlinearity

Abstract

We address the effect of quintic nonlinearities in the propagation of optical solitons in cubic nonlinear media. Our focus is on the decay of higher-order solitons in the presence of self-defocusing quintic perturbations. We show that, in spite of the fact that the governing evolution equations are symmetric, the quintic nonlinearity produces the asymmetrical self-splitting of the solitons. We study in detail the self-splitting process and compare the results with the soliton evolution with self-focusing quintic perturbations.