Light bullets in nonlinear waveguide arrays under the influence of dispersion and the Raman effect

We study the formation and the dynamics of spatially broad light bullets generated in silica waveguide arrays. We show that these bullets are metastable even in the presence of high-order dispersion, coupling dispersion, and the Raman effect and can be approximated by the hyperbolic secant function with a high degree of accuracy. We also investigate the formation of narrow light bullets which are spatially localized in only a few adjacent waveguides and short in time. We reveal that the latter are extremely robust even in the presence of the Raman effect. © 2014 American Physical Society.