The dissipative Kerr soliton (DKS) in microresonators and fiber resonators is typically described as a double balance between dispersion and nonlinearity and loss and nonlinear gain. Here is a small animation that shows these four different actors working on a stable soliton equilibrium.
Of course the movements are greatly exaggerated. A usual steady-state soliton in a microresonator is very stable and is therefore useful for various low-noise applications in metrology and RF synthesis. However, recently there has also been an increased interest in so-called breather solitons, which change their shape periodically (M. Yu, et al., Arxiv 1609.01760 and E. Lucas, et al., Arxiv 1611.06567).
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.