Bound states between dark and bright solitons in dispersion maps

Summary form only given. It is well known that bright solitons exist in fibers with anomalous group-velocity dispersion while normal dispersion fiber supports dark solitons. Today dispersion-managed fibers are widely used, and it has been shown that bright solitons, if somewhat modified, exist in such fibers. This is certainly true for path-averaged anomalous dispersion, but it even holds for path-averaged normal dispersion. We have shown just recently that the converse is true for dark solitons: it is not so surprising that they exist for path-averaged normal dispersion but they also exist for path-averaged anomalous dispersion. There is thus an overlap of the stability ranges of dark and bright solitons. This gives us now the opportunity to discuss interactions between dark and bright solitons in one and the same dispersion map. We will here demonstrate a bound state in which a dark soliton is locked between two bright solitons.