SOLITON SWITCHING AND PROPAGATION IN NONLINEAR FIBER COUPLERS - ANALYTICAL RESULTS

The propagation and the switching of solitons in nonlinear optical fib er couplers have been investigated with a variational method within th e framework of the Lagrangian density formulation. Simple analytical s olutions have been found to the coupled nonlinear Schrodinger equation s that govern the soliton propagation in a nonlinear fiber coupler. It is shown that the soliton propagation and switching behavior predicte d by the present analytical method agrees well with results from numer ical analysis. In particular, we found that the present analysis is ac curate in predicting soliton switching from one core to the other. In addition, our analysis leads us to the discovery of new soliton eigens tates and to the determination of the bifurcation behavior of solitons in nonlinear fiber couplers.