Acoustic solitons: A robust tool to investigate the generation and detection of ultrafast acoustic waves

Solitons are self-preserving traveling waves of great interest in nonlinear physics, offering many interesting application such as high-bandwidth optical fiber communication. Solitons can also appear in ultrafast acoustics, and several observations suggest acoustic solitons as short as 200 fs. Here, the authors designed an experimental setup to observe and characterize acoustic solitons traveling through a GaAs(001) substrate. The experimental signal is explained well with the help of the Korteweg--de Vries equation, demonstrating the particlelike nature and the unique properties of the solitons. Moreover, the temporal distribution of the solitons is also analyzed with the help of the inverse scattering method. Such investigations provide a new tool to probe transient properties of highly excited matter through the study of the solitons due to the acoustic pulse emitted after laser excitation.