Cusp solitons mediated by a topological nonlinearity - part 2

For an introduction see part 1, which I wrote when our paper was uploaded to arXiv.

After a few rounds of review our paper was published in Chaos last week!

With so much negativity surrounding peer review nowadays, it is important to highlight when it works well. Our original manuscript mentioned a few possible experimental realizations of our new model, without going into specifics - it seemed like a hard problem which could not be solved before Harvey was due to graduate. So we left it for future work.

The referees correctly pointed out that a vague discussion of possible implementations is not very helpful - this hard problem is then delegated to the reader. Could we provide specifics?

We could not at the time of writing the manuscript. But the referee comments inspired (forced?) us to try harder. During our search we stumbled upon a very nice experiment published in Physical Review Letters: Nonlinear Non-Hermitian Skin Effect and Skin Solitons in Temporal Photonic Feedforward Lattices

We realized that the feedforward nonlinearity used in this work could be readily adapted to realize our model. We added the recipe to our manuscript as an appendix, giving strong evidence for the experimental feasibility of observing our results!

Peer review isn't meant to be just a rubber stamp or a hard rejection; it should also be a way to help present the research in the best possible way. While "open science" and "open peer review" are trending topics, anonymity gives referees the safety to ask hard (or annoying) questions.