Interaction of sine-Gordon kinks and breathers with a parity-time-symmetric defect

Attraction centers and parity-time-symmetric delta-functional dipoles in critical and supercritical self-focusing media

We introduce a model based on the one-dimensional nonlinear Schrödinger equation with critical (quintic) or supercritical self-focusing nonlinearity. We demonstrate that a family of solitons, which are unstable in this setting against the critical or supercritical collapse, is stabilized by pinning to an attractive defect, that may also include a parity-time (PT)-symmetric gain-loss component. The model can be realized as a planar waveguide in nonlinear optics, and in a super-Tonks-Girardeau bosonic gas. For the attractive defect with the delta-functional profile, a full family of the pinned solitons is found in an exact analytical form. In the absence of the gain-loss term, the solitons' stability is investigated in an analytical form too, by means of the Vakhitov-Kolokolov criterion; in the presence of the PT-balanced gain and loss, the stability is explored by means of numerical methods. In particular, the entire family of pinned solitons is stable in the quintic (critical) medium if the gain-loss term is absent. A stability region for the pinned solitons persists in the model with an arbitrarily high power of the self-focusing nonlinearity. A weak gain-loss component gives rise to intricate alternations of stability and instability in the system's parameter plane. Those solitons which are unstable under the action of the supercritical self-attraction are destroyed by the collapse. On the other hand, if the self-attraction-driven instability is weak and the gain-loss term is present, unstable solitons spontaneously transform into localized breathers, while the collapse does not occur. The same outcome may be caused by a combination of the critical nonlinearity with the gain and loss. Instability of the solitons is also possible when the PT-symmetric gain-loss term is added to the subcritical nonlinearity. The system with self-repulsive nonlinearity is briefly considered too, producing completely stable families of pinned localized states.