Experimental observation of interaction between Bragg solitons

Summary form only given.Possibly the most appealing property of optical solitons is their particle-like behavior. Solitons tend to survive perturbations and collisions and interact nondestructively with each other. Indeed for optical solitons which obey the integrable nonlinear Schrodinger equation the interaction can be either attractive or repulsive, depending on the relative phase of the two solitons. In both cases the dynamics is well understood; either a periodic evolution (in the attractive case) or for the repulsive case a two soliton solution which is well approximated by the sum of the separated one soliton solutions. Bragg solitons, on the other hand, are described by nonintegrable equations. This means that, while they are also robust, in that they possess a particle-like behavior, they show the distinct signature of nonintegrability in that collisions are typically inelastic. In the paper we report on experimental studies of interactions of Bragg solitons in optical fibers.