Delayed-action interaction between two-dimensional composite solitons

Summary form only given. Soliton interactions are universal, displaying features common to all solitons, in spite of the diversity of the physical systems in which solitons are found. The reason for this universality is the fact that solitons can be viewed as modes of their own induced waveguide. The simplest case arises when the self-induced waveguide has only one mode populated, in which case the soliton is a "scalar soliton". In this vein, collisions of single-mode solitons can be viewed intuitively as interactions between guided modes of adjacent waveguides. In this case, the interaction outcome is determined by the relation between the collision angle and the (complementary) critical angle for total internal reflection in each waveguide, /spl theta//sub c/. Experimentally, collisions between scalar solitons were studied in detail, demonstrating fully-elastic collisions between Kerr solitons, almost-elastic collisions between solitons in saturable nonlinearities interacting at angles above /spl theta//sub c/ and inelastic collisions that yield fusion, fission, annihilation, and spiraling.