Leapfrogging of electrical solitons in coupled nonlinear transmission lines: effect of an imperfect varactor

The leapfrogging dynamics of a pair of electrical solitons is investigated, by considering two capacitively coupled nonlinear transmission lines with and without intraline resistances. We discuss two distinct transmission line set-ups: in the first, we assume two RLC ladder lines with intraline varactors and a coupling linear capacitor, and in the second, we consider two capacitively coupled lossless lines with a varactor carrying impurity (imperfect diode) in one of the two interacting transmission lines. In the first context, we find that the soliton-pair leapfrogging mimics the motion of a damped harmonic oscillator, the frequency and damping coefficient of which are obtained analytically. Numerical simulations predict leapfrogging of the soliton pair when the differences in the initial values of the amplitude and phase are reasonably small, and the resistance is not too large. In the second context, leapfrogging occurs when the impurity rate is small enough and the differences in the initial values of the amplitude as well as phase are also small. As the impurity rate increases, the soliton signal in the imperfect line gets accelerated upon approaching the defective diode, causing only this specific soliton signal to move faster than its counterpart, leading to the suppression of leapfrogging.