Konwersatorium im. Leopolda Infelda

During the past ten years, there has been intensive development in theoretical and experimental studies of dynamics of solitons in periodic heterogeneous media, which are built as periodic concatenations of very different elements. Well-known examples are dispersion management in fiber optics, and (more recently) soliton transmission in photonic crystals. The talk aims to give a brief overview of basic results in the field, with an attempt to propose a concept of a general class of such systems. New systems belonging to the class have recently been identified in nonlinear optics (such as "split-step" and "tandem" models), and the transmission of solitary pulses in them was investigated. Similar soliton dynamics occurs in temporal-domain counterparts of such systems, which are subject to strong time-periodic modulation (an important example is the "Feshbach-resonance management" in Bose-Einstein condensates).