We investigate the existence and stability of different families of spatial solitons in optical waveguide arrays whose amplitudes obey a disordered distribution. The competition between focusing nonlinearity and linearly disordered refractive index modulation results in the formation of spatial localized nonlinear states. Solitons originating from Anderson modes with few nodes are robust during propagation. While multi-peaked solitons with in-phase neighboring components are completely unstable, multipole-mode solitons whose neighboring components are out-of-phase can propagate stably in wide parameter regions provided that their power exceeds a critical value. Our findings, thus, provide the first example of stable higher-order nonlinear states in disordered systems.
We investigate the existence and stability of different families of spatial solitons in optical waveguide arrays whose amplitudes obey a disordered distribution. The competition between focusing nonlinearity and linearly disordered refractive index modulation results in the formation of spatial localized nonlinear states. Solitons originating from Anderson modes with few nodes are robust during propagation. While multi-peaked solitons with in-phase neighboring components are completely unstable, multipole-mode solitons whose neighboring components are out-of-phase can propagate stably in wide parameter regions provided that their power exceeds a critical value. Our findings, thus, provide the first example of stable higher-order nonlinear states in disordered systems.