Related papers: Bouncing localized structures in a liquid-crystal …
When propagating through periodically structured media, i. e. photonic crystals, optical waves will be modulated with the periodicity. As a result, the dispersion of waves will no longer behave as in a free space, and so called frequency…
We analyze the time evolution of spin-polarized electron wave packets injected into the edge states of a two-dimensional topological insulator. In the presence of electron interactions, the system is described as a helical Luttinger liquid…
An air bubble trapped in water by an oscillating acoustic field undergoes either radial or nonspherical pulsations depending on the strength of the forcing pressure. Two different instability mechanisms (the Rayleigh--Taylor instability and…
Optical lattices have proven to be powerful systems for quantum simulations of solid state physics effects. Here we report a proof-of-principle experiment simulating effects predicted by relativistic wave equations with ultracold atoms in a…
By means of the variational method and numerical simulations, we demonstrate the existence of stable 3D nonlinear modes, viz. vortex ``bullets'', in the form of pulsed beams carrying orbital angular momentum, that can self-trap in a 2D…
We consider a mixture consisting of two species of spherical nanoparticles dispersed in a liquid medium. We show that with an appropriate choice of refractive indices and particle diameters, it is possible to observe the phenomenon of…
Computer simulations of simple model systems for liquid crystals are briefly reviewed, with special emphasis on systems of ellipsoids. First, we give an overview over some of the most commonly studied systems (ellipsoids, Gay-Berne…
We analyze the existence and stability of nonlinear localized waves in a periodic medium described by the Kronig-Penney model with a nonlinear defect. We demonstrate the existence of a novel type of stable nonlinear band-gap localized…
We present nonlinear dynamic equations for nematic and smectic $A$ liquid crystals in the presence of an alternating electric field and explain their derivation in detail. The local electric field acting in any liquid-crystalline system is…
A system of equations has been proposed for a monochromatic weakly nonlinear light wave in a Kerr medium. This system is equivalent up to the third order in electric field to the known equation $\mbox{curl}\,\mbox{curl}\, {\bf E}=k_0^2[{\bf…
Recent studies on confined crystals of charged colloidal particles are reviewed, both in equilibrium and out of equilibrium. We focus in particular on direct comparisons of experiments (light scattering and microscopy) with lattice sum…
Experimental evidence for the generation of intrinsic localized modes (ILMs) in a nonlinear electrical transmission line is presented both via modulational instability (MI) of the uniform mode and via driving the lattice locally. The…
Detecting structures at the particle scale within plastically deformed crystalline materials allows a better understanding of the occurring phenomena. While previous approaches mostly relied on applying hand-chosen criteria on different…
The problem of describing optical turbulent structures, arising in resonant media with high Fresnel numbers, is reviewed. The consideration is based on the probabilistic approach to pattern selection, ascribing a probability distribution of…
A numerical study is presented of one-dimensional and two-dimensional random lasers as a function of the pumping rate above the threshold for lasing. Depending on the leakiness of the cavity modes, we observe that the stationary lasing…
We investigate theoretically and experimentally the optical beam propagation in the nematic liquid crystal with negative dielectric anisotropy, which is aligned homeotropically in a $80\mu m$-thickness planar cell in the presence of an…
In classical mechanics, a particle cannot escape from an unbounded potential well. Naively, one would expect a similar result to hold in wave mechanics, since high barriers make tunneling difficult. However, this is not always the case and…
We investigate the dynamics of a soliton that behaves as an extended particle. The soliton motion in an effective bistable potential can be chaotic in a similar way as the Duffing oscillator. We generalize the concept of geometrical…
We use tools from nonlinear dynamics to the detailed analysis of cold atom experiments. A powerful example is provided by the recent concept of basin entropy which allows to quantify the final state unpredictability that results from the…
We demonstrate numerically that partially incoherent light can be trapped in the spectral band gaps of a photonic lattice, creating partially incoherent multi-component spatial optical solitons in a self-defocusing nonlinear periodic…