Boris A. Malomed - Böcker

During the past ten years, there has been intensive development in theoretical and experimental research of solitons in periodic media. This book provides a unique and informative account of the state-of-the-art in the field. The volume opens with a review of the existence of robust solitary pulses in systems built as a periodic concatenation of very different elements. Among the most famous examples of this type of systems are the dispersion management in fiber-optic telecommunication links, and (more recently) photonic crystals. A number of other systems belonging to the same broad class of spatially periodic strongly inhomogeneous media (such as the split-step and tandem models) have recently been identified in nonlinear optics, and transmission of solitary pulses in them was investigated in detail. Similar soliton dynamics occurs in temporal-domain counterparts of such systems, where they are subject to strong time-periodic modulation (for instance, the Feshbach-resonance management in Bose-Einstein condensates). Basis results obtained for all these systems are reviewed in the book. This timely work will serve as a useful resource for the soliton community.

During the past ten years, there has been intensive development in theoretical and experimental research of solitons in periodic media. This book provides a unique and informative account of the state-of-the-art in the field. The volume opens with a review of the existence of robust solitary pulses in systems built as a periodic concatenation of very different elements. Among the most famous examples of this type of systems are the dispersion management in fiber-optic telecommunication links, and (more recently) photonic crystals. A number of other systems belonging to the same broad class of spatially periodic strongly inhomogeneous media (such as the split-step and tandem models) have recently been identified in nonlinear optics, and transmission of solitary pulses in them was investigated in detail. Similar soliton dynamics occurs in temporal-domain counterparts of such systems, where they are subject to strong time-periodic modulation (for instance, the Feshbach-resonance management in Bose-Einstein condensates). Basis results obtained for all these systems are reviewed in the book. This timely work will serve as a useful resource for the soliton community.

This volume collects a a number of contributions on spontaneous symmetry breaking. Current studies in this general field are going ahead at a full speed. The book present review chapters which give an overview on the major break throughs of recent years. It covers a number of different physical settings which are introduced when a nonlinearity is added to the underlying symmetric problems and its strength exceeds a certain critical value. The corresponding loss of symmetry, called spontaneous symmetry breaking, alias self-trapping into asymmetric states is extensively discussed in this book. The book presents both active theoretical studies of spontaneous symmetry breaking effects as well as experimental findings, chiefly for Bose-Einstein-Condensates with the self-repulsive nonlinearity, and also for photorefractive media in optics.