Bistability and instability of dark-antidark solitons in the cubic-quintic nonlinear Schrödinger equation

Abstract

We characterize the full family of soliton solutions sitting over a background plane wave and ruled by the cubic-quintic nonlinear Schrödinger equation in the regime where a quintic focusing term represents a saturation of the cubic defocusing nonlinearity. We discuss the existence and properties of solitons in terms of catastrophe theory and fully characterize bistability and instabilities of the dark-antidark pairs, revealing mechanisms of decay of antidark solitons into dispersive shock waves.