EXCITATION AND DYNAMICS OF PULSES IN COUPLED FIBER ARRAYS

We consider a system of nearest neighbor linearly coupled nonlinear Sc hrodinger equations. The system models a coupled array of optical fibe rs in the anomalous dispersion regime, In the infinite array case, a s harp power threshold for the excitation of a coupled array soliton (no nlinear ground state) is found, For the periodic array (ring geometry) , a soliton is excited for arbitrary values of the power, Coupled arra y solitons are nonlinearly dynamically stable. As the power increases, the coupled array solitons become increasingly peaked in amplitude, l ocalized on the lattice as well as temporally compressed, As the power tends to infinity, a rescaled limit of the ground state converges to a pure one-soliton. The results provide a mathematical theory for the observations of previous investigators made by computer simulations.