Formation of quartic solitons and a localized continuum in silicon-based slot waveguides

We explore the possibility of exciting the so-called quartic solitons in specially designed slot waveguides based on silicon and silica or silicon nanocrystals. This requires the excitation of the structure with quasi-transverse-magnetic polarized pulses-for which the Raman effect is absent-and at a specific infrared wavelength for which only the second- and fourth-order group velocity coefficients are nonvanishing. Pulses launched in these conditions will generate a spectrally localized continuum coming from the spectral interference of many quartic solitons. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.87.025801