Spatiotemporal solitons in birefringent media near the zero-dispersion point

We present a new species of spatiotemporal solitions (STSs, alias light bullets) that may be formed through the interaction of two waves with different polarizations in a birefringent Kerr medium near the point at which the second-order group-velocity dispersion (GVD) vanishes in the presence of a uniform ew background in one component. The analysis is based on an asymptotic reduction of the two cross-phase, modulation-coupled (2+1)-dimensional nonlinear Schrödinger equations, incorporating the third-order GVD to the Davey-Stewartson (DS) systems of type I or II for the self-defocusing and focusing Kerr nonlinearity, respectively. The STSs are then predicted following the pattern of the dromion solutions of the DS-I system and lump solitons of the DS-II system. Strictly speaking, the solitons are unstable, but they are shown to be stable objects on experimentally relevant scales of the propagation distance.