A soliton is a concept which describes various physical phenomena ranging from solitary waves forming on water to ultrashort optical pulses propagating in an optical fiber. While solitons are usually attributed to integrability, in recent years the notion of a soliton has been extended to various systems which are not necessarily integrable. Until now, the main emphasis has been given to well-known conservative soliton systems, but new avenues of inquiry were opened when physicists realized that solitary waves did indeed exist in a wide range of non-integrable and non-conservative systems leading to the concept of so-called dissipative optical solitons.
Dissipative optical solitons have manyunique properties which differ from those of their conservative counterparts. For example, except for very few cases, they form zero-parameter families and their properties are completely determined by the external parameters of the optical system. They can exist indefinitely in time, as long as these parameters stay constant. These features of dissipative solitons are highly desirable for several applications, such as in-line regeneration of optical data streams and generation of stable trains of laser pulses by mode-locked cavities.