Complexity and stability of soliton management in periodically modulated and random systems

A brief introduction is given to the concept of the soliton management, i.e., stable motion of localized pulses in media with strong periodic (or, sometimes, random) inhomogeneity, or conditions for the survival of solitons in models with strong time‐periodic modulation of linear or nonlinear coefficients. It is demonstrated that a class of systems can be identified, in which solitons remain robust inherently coherent objects in seemingly “hostile” environments. Most physical models belonging to this class originate in nonlinear optics and Bose‐Einstein condensation, although other examples are known too (in particular, in hydrodynamics). In this paper, the complexity of the soliton‐management systems, and the robustness of solitons in them are illustrated using a recently explored fiber‐optic setting combining a periodic concatenation of nonlinear and dispersive segments (the split‐step model) for bimodal optical signals (i.e., ones with two polarizations of light), which includes the polarization mode dispersion, i.e., random linear mixing of the two polarization components at junctions between the fiber segment. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity, 2008