Spontaneous symmetry breaking and ghost states supported by the fractional PT-symmetric saturable nonlinear Schrödinger equation

Abstract

We report a novel spontaneous symmetry breaking phenomenon and ghost states existed in the framework of the fractional nonlinear Schrödinger equation with focusing saturable nonlinearity and PT-symmetric potential. The continuous asymmetric soliton branch bifurcates from the fundamental symmetric one as the power exceeds some critical value. Intriguingly, the symmetry of fundamental solitons is broken into two branches of asymmetry solitons (alias ghost states) with complex conjugate propagation constants, which is solely in fractional media. Besides, the dipole and tripole solitons (i.e., first and second excited states) are also studied numerically. Moreover, we analyze the influences of fractional Lévy index (α) and saturable nonlinear parameters (S) on the symmetry breaking of solitons in detail. The stability of fundamental symmetric soliton, asymmetric, dipole, and tripole solitons is explored via the linear stability analysis and direct propagations. Moreover, we explore the elastic/semi-elastic collision phenomena between symmetric and asymmetric solitons. Meanwhile, we find the stable excitations from the fractional diffraction with saturation nonlinearity to integer-order diffraction with Kerr nonlinearity via the adiabatic excitations of parameters. These results will provide some theoretical basis for the study of spontaneous symmetry breaking phenomena and related physical experiments in the fractional media with PT-symmetric potentials.