Soliton Phase Shifts in a Dissipative Lattice

Abstract:

We report measurements of soliton phase shifts resulting from head-on collisions in the LC lattice of Hirota and Suzuki, the electrical analog of the Toda Lattice. The effect of dissipation along this lattice is to decrease the amplitude and increase the width of the solitons as they travel down the lattice. To within experimental error, however, we found that the velocity and phase shifts remain constant, so that a soliton species is uniquely determined by its velocity. This shows that the positional phase of such solitons can be used to encode information in a very simple way, and that the lattice can be used to do computation, of which parity checking is a simple example.