Characteristics of optical multi-peak solitons induced by higher-order effects in an erbium-doped fiber system

We study multi-peak solitons \textit{on a plane-wave background} in an erbium-doped fiber system with some higher-order effects, which is governed by a coupled Hirota and Maxwel-Bloch (H-MB) model. The important characteristics of multi-peak solitons induced by the higher-order effects, such as the velocity changes, localization or periodicity attenuation, and state transitions, are revealed in detail. In particular, our results demonstrate explicitly that a multi-peak soliton can be converted to an anti-dark soliton when the periodicity vanishes; on the other hand, a multi-peak soliton is transformed to a periodic wave when the localization vanishes. Numerical simulations are performed to confirm the propagation stability of multi-peak solitons riding on a plane-wave background. Finally, we compare and discuss the similarity and difference of multi-peak solitons in special degenerate cases of the H-MB system with general existence conditions.