title: Spontaneous reorientations of meta-atoms and electromagnetic spatial solitons in a liquid metacrystal.
abstract: We show that transverse electromagnetic waves propagating along an external static electric field in liquid metacrystal (LMC) can provoke spontaneous rearrangement of elongated meta-atoms that changes the direction of the anisotropy axis of the LMC. This kind of instability may reorient the meta-atoms from the equilibrium state parallel to a static field to the state along a high-frequency field and back at the different threshold intensities of electromagnetic waves in such a way that bistability in the system takes place. Reorientation of meta-atoms causes a change in the effective refraction index of LMC that creates, in turn, the conditions for the formation of bright spatial solitons. Such spatial solitons are the self-consistent domains of redirected meta-atoms with trapped photons. We find that the instability thresholds as well as energy flux captured by the spatial soliton can be easily managed by variation of the static electric field applied to the LMC. We study the effects of soliton excitation and collisions via numerical simulations.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Physics of Microstructures, Russian Academy of Sciences, Nizhny Novgorod, 603950 Russia and N.I. Lobachevsky State University, Nizhny Novgorod, 603950 Russia.
authors.forename: Alexander A
authors.initials: AA
authors.lastname: Zharov
authors.affiliation: Institute for Physics of Microstructures, Russian Academy of Sciences, Nizhny Novgorod, 603950 Russia and N.I. Lobachevsky State University, Nizhny Novgorod, 603950 Russia.
authors.forename: Alexander A
authors.initials: AA
authors.lastname: Zharov
authors.affiliation: Institute of Applied Physics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Nizhny Novgorod, 603950 Russia.
authors.forename: Nina A
authors.initials: NA
authors.lastname: Zharova
mesh_terms: D016880:Anisotropy; D003198:Computer Simulation; D055590:Electromagnetic Phenomena; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D009038:Motion; D017711:Nonlinear Dynamics; D017785:Photons; D012996:Solutions; D014783:Viscosity
chemical_list: D012996:Solutions