Regular, beating and dilogarithmic breathers in biased photorefractive crystals

The propagation of light beams in photovoltaic pyroelectric photorefractive crystals is modelled by a specific generalization of the nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation (GNLSE). We use the variational approximation (VA) to predict the propagation of solitary-wave inputs in the crystal, finding that the VA equations involve the dilogarithm special function. The VA predicts that solitons and breathers exist, and the Vakhitov-Kolokolov criterion predicts that the solitons are stable solutions. Direct simulations of the underlying GNLSE corroborates the existence of such stable modes. The numerical solutions produce both regular breathers and ones featuring beats (long-period modulations of fast oscillations). In the latter case, the Fourier transform of amplitude oscillations reveals a nearly discrete spectrum characterizing the beats dynamics. Numerical solutions of another type demonstrate spontaneous splitting of the input pulse in two or several secondary ones.