During the past ten years, there has been intensive development intheoretical and experimental research of solitons in periodic media. Thisbook provides a unique and informative account of the state-of-the-art inthe field. The volume opens with a review of the existence of robustsolitary pulses in systems built as a periodic concatenation of verydifferent elements. Among the most famous examples of this type ofsystems are the dispersion management in fiber-optictelecommunication links, and (more recently) photonic crystals.

During the past ten years, there has been intensive development in theoretical and experimental research of solitons in periodic media. This book provides a unique and informative account of the state-of-the-art in the field. The volume opens with a review of the existence of robust solitary pulses in systems built as a periodic concatenation of very different elements. Among the most famous examples of this type of systems are the dispersion management in fiber-optic telecommunication links, and (more recently) photonic crystals. A number of other systems belonging to the same broad class of...

This volume collects a a number of contributions on spontaneous symmetry breaking. Current studies in this general field are going ahead at a full speed. The book present review chapters which give an overview on the major break throughs of recent years. It covers a number of different physical settings which are introduced when a nonlinearity is added to the underlying symmetric problems and its strength exceeds a certain critical value. The corresponding loss of symmetry, called spontaneous symmetry breaking, alias self-trapping into asymmetric states is extensively discussed in this book....

This volume collects a a number of contributions on spontaneous symmetry breaking. Current studies in this general field are going ahead at a full speed. The book present review chapters which give an overview on the major break throughs of recent years. It covers a number of different physical settings which are introduced when a nonlinearity is added to the underlying symmetric problems and its strength exceeds a certain critical value. The corresponding loss of symmetry, called spontaneous symmetry breaking, alias self-trapping into asymmetric states is extensively discussed in this book....