Dissipative Josephson junction of an optical soliton and a surface plasmon

Abstract

We examine the dynamics of a dissipative photonic Josephson junction formed by the weak coupling of an optical soliton in a nonlinear dielectric waveguide and a co-propagating surface plasmon along a parallel metal surface with a linear dielectric spacer. We employ a heuristic model with a coupling function that depends on the soliton amplitude and consider two phenomenological dissipation mechanisms separately: angular-velocity dissipation and population imbalance dissipation. In the former dissipation mechanism, the system exhibits a phase-slip phenomenon where the odd-pi phase modes decay into even-pi phase modes. The latter damping mechanism sculptures the phase space significantly by introducing complex features, among which, Hopf-type bifurcations are notable. We show that some of the bifurcation points expand to stable limit cycles for certain regimes of the model parameters.