Measuring the interaction law of dissipative solitons

Abstract

We investigate the interaction of self-organized solitary current filaments (dissipative solitons) under the influence of noise in a planar dc gas-discharge system with high-ohmic barrier. These localized structures exhibit interesting properties such as propagation and scattering as well as the transient formation of molecules and clusters. To quantitatively examine these interesting properties, methods of stochastic data analysis are developed to determine interaction laws from experimentally recorded data series. It turns out that in most cases, the sign of the resulting interaction functions alternates with the distance of the dissipative solitons. This phenomenon can be connected to experimentally detectable oscillatorily decaying tails of the filaments, which is in agreement with theoretical predictions.