Study of the collective states of externally driven, damped nonlinear Schrodinger solitons

We study bifurcations of localized time-independent solutions to the extern ally driven, damped nonlinear Schrodinger equation in the region of large g amma (gamma > 1/2). For each pair of h and gamma, there are two coexisting solitons, Psi(+) and Psi(-). As the driver strength h increases at fixed ga mma, the soliton Psi(+) merges with a flat background, while the soliton Ps i(-) forms a stationary collective state with two "psi-pluses": Psi(-) --> Psi((+-+)). We obtain other stationary solutions and identify them as multi soliton complexes Psi((++)), Psi((-)), Psi((-+)), Psi((---)), Psi((-+-)). e tc. The corresponding intersoliton separations are compared with the predic tions of a variational approximation.