Tailoring PT-symmetric soliton switch

We theoretically demonstrate soliton steering in parity-time (PT)-symmetric coupled nonlinear dimers. We show that if the length of the PT-symmetric system is set to 2 pi, contrary to the conventional one that operates satisfactorily well only at the half-beat coupling length, the PT dimer remarkably yields an ideal soliton switch exhibiting almost 99.99% energy efficiency with an ultralow critical power. (C) 2019 Optical Society of America