QUANTUM-MECHANICAL STABILITY OF SOLITONS AND THE CORRESPONDENCE PRINCIPLE

A Hanbury Brown-Twiss experiment is described that is capable of demon strating, in principle, the solitary behavior of a quantum soliton in an arbitrary fundamental soliton state. The relevant correlation funct ions are evaluated and show that the quantum noise does not cause a br eakup of the solitons of the quantized nonlinear Schrodinger equation. For large photon numbers, the intensity autocorrelation function of t he fundamental soliton becomes independent of certain momentum and pho ton-number distributions, which gives us a correspondence principle fo r the fundamental soliton. Whereas intensity-correlation measurements based on direct detection show essentially classical behavior for larg e photon numbers, homodyne-detection experiments can uncover quantum e ffects such as the generation of Schrodinger-cat solitons.