Normal and anomalous random walks of 2-d solitons

Abstract

Solitons, which describe the propagation of concentrated beams of light through nonlinear media, can exhibit a variety of behaviors as a result of the intrinsic dissipation, diffraction, and the nonlinear effects. One of these phenomena, modeled by the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation, are chaotic explosions, transient enlargements of the soliton that may induce random transversal displacements, which in the long run lead to a random walk of the soliton center. As we show in this work, the transition from non-moving to moving solitons is not a simple bifurcation but includes a sequence of normal and anomalous random walks. We analyze their statistics with the distribution of generalized diffusivities, a novel approach that has been used successfully for characterizing anomalous diffusion.