Mothers who listen with more than ears: The phenomenological experience of the non-verbal communication between mothers and their child with complex cerebral palsy

In England, every 1000 babies born 1 will be left with complex cerebral palsy affecting all limbs and internal organs. Of those children by age 12, 43% will have no consistent way to communicate with the world. Empirically, many mothers of these children self-report that they can communicate effectively with their children in these cases in a way that possibly only the mother understands. Understanding the mother’s experience of living with a complex cerebral palsy non-verbal child is important for professionals and the society that supports them. The aim of this research is not to prove or disprove this phenomenon but rather to explore the lived experience of mothers with disabled non-verbal cerebral palsy children, validating and giving a voice to an otherwise isolated abnormal form of mothering. A homogenous sample was collected made up of 8 mothers who had non-verbal complex cerebral palsy as a result of Hypoxic Ischemic Encephalopathy at birth. The age range of the children was not > 3 and not <16. Interviews took place on a video link, semi-structured interviews were done and the six stages of a Heuristic Inquiry were used to analyse the transcribed data. The results produced 7 universal themes: ‘The Choice to Communicate,’ ‘Communication Over Time’, Impediments to communication’, ‘Certainty and Uncertainty’, ‘Embodied Communication’, ‘Being Towards Communication’, and ‘Being in the World with Others’. These themes capture the essence of the experience that mothers have when confronted by a baby that is diagnosed with multiple disabilities and unable to verbalise. The findings that emerged are fundamentally existential and they are examined through an existential lens

Self-Chaotization in Coupled Optical Waveguides

We consider theoretically two coupled optical waveguides with a varying barrier height along the waveguides direction. The barrier could be constructed by the elongated island with a reduced refractive index (which acts as a potential barrier), such that in the middle region it splits a waveguide into two weakly coupled parts. It is predicted by numerical simulations and analytical consideration that the presence of some imperfection of the system parameters can cause splitting of injected laser beam and one will observe two intensity maximums at the output, while for small imperfections the input and output beam intensity distributions will be the same. The switching between two regimes could be achieved changing spectral width of the beam or refractive index of the island. This nontrivial effect is explained by possibility of transitions between the different eigenstates of the system in the region of large potential barrier heights. The mentioned effect could be used for all-optical readdressing and filtering purposes

Inverse scattering approach to coupled higher order nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation and N-soliton solutions

A generalized inverse scattering method has been applied to the linear problem associated with the coupled higher order nonlinear schr\"odinger equation to obtain it's $N$-soliton solution. An infinite number of conserved quantities have been obtained by solving a set of coupled Riccati equations. It has been shown that the coupled system admits two different class of solutions, characterised by the number of local maxima of amplitude of the soliton.Comment: 23 page

Optoacoustic solitons in Bragg gratings

Optical gap solitons, which exist due to a balance of nonlinearity and dispersion due to a Bragg grating, can couple to acoustic waves through electrostriction. This gives rise to a new species of ``gap-acoustic'' solitons (GASs), for which we find exact analytic solutions. The GAS consists of an optical pulse similar to the optical gap soliton, dressed by an accompanying phonon pulse. Close to the speed of sound, the phonon component is large. In subsonic (supersonic) solitons, the phonon pulse is a positive (negative) density variation. Coupling to the acoustic field damps the solitons' oscillatory instability, and gives rise to a distinct instability for supersonic solitons, which may make the GAS decelerate and change direction, ultimately making the soliton subsonic.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Multisoliton solutions and integrability aspects of coupled nonlinear Schrodinger equations

Using Painleve singularity structure analysis, we show that coupled higher-order nonlinear Schrodinger (CHNLS) equations admit Painleve property. Using the results of Painleve analysis, we succeed in Hirota bilinearizing the CHNLS equations, one soliton and two soliton solutions are explictly obtained. Lax pairs are explictly constructed.Comment: Eight pages and six figures. Physical Review E (to be appear

The Sasa-Satsuma higher order nonlinear Schrodinger equation and its bilinearization and multi-soliton solutions

Higher order and multicomponent generalizations of the nonlinear Schrodinger equation are important in various applications, e.g., in optics. One of these equations, the integrable Sasa-Satsuma equation, has particularly interesting soliton solutions. Unfortunately the construction of multi-soliton solutions to this equation presents difficulties due to its complicated bilinearization. We discuss briefly some previous attempts and then give the correct bilinearization based on the interpretation of the Sasa-Satsuma equation as a reduction of the three-component Kadomtsev-Petvishvili hierarchy. In the process we also get bilinearizations and multi-soliton formulae for a two component generalization of the Sasa-Satsuma equation (the Yajima-Oikawa-Tasgal-Potasek model), and for a (2+1)-dimensional generalization.Comment: 13 pages in RevTex, added reference

Conservation Laws in Higher-Order Nonlinear Optical Effects

Conservation laws of the nonlinear Schr\"{o}dinger equation are studied in the presence of higher-order nonlinear optical effects including the third-order dispersion and the self-steepening. In a context of group theory, we derive a general expression for infinitely many conserved currents and charges of the coupled higher-order nonlinear Schr\"{o}dinger equation. The first few currents and charges are also presented explicitly. Due to the higher-order effects, conservation laws of the nonlinear Schr\"{o}dinger equation are violated in general. The differences between the types of the conserved currents for the Hirota and the Sasa-Satsuma equations imply that the higher-order terms determine the inherent types of conserved quantities for each integrable cases of the higher-order nonlinear Schr\"{o}dinger equation