Chirped solitons as attractors for short light pulses

Nonlinear chirped pulse solutions are shown to exist as stable attractors for short light pulses in driven and damped systems. The attractors are determined for systems of different complexity, from simple gain and damping modelings up to the inclusion of higher-order dispersion, Raman processes, and delayed nonlinear responses. The chirped attractors, their stability, as well as the attractor basins can be determined analytically. The analytical predictions are in excellent agreement with numerical simulations.