Dark and bright incoherent solitons

Summary form only given. Incoherent solitons, or in a more general perspective, self-trapped incoherent wavepackets, are a new direction into which soliton physics is evolving. Until 1995, all soliton experiments in nature employed a coherent "pulse", i.e., the phases are correlated across the beam. However, pulses (localized wavepackets) do not necessarily need to be coherent. For example, one can focus into a spot a beam from a natural source such as the Sun or an incandescent light bulb. Can such a beam self-trap in a nonlinear medium and form a soliton? The authors discuss recent experimental and theoretical progress in soliton physics and point out that from this one thing is obvious: this new direction of soliton science is still hiding a great deal of fundamental surprises that are yet to be discovered.