Instability of bosonic topological edge states in the presence of interactions

We analyze the stability of extended edge modes in a nonlinear (i.e., interacting) bosonic topological insulator. We see that these nonlinear modes are always unstable, despite the topological protection of edge modes in the linear system. For concreteness we use a photonic platform, but the results generalize to other bosonic systems. We give a detailed description of the system in two extreme cases, low nonlinearity and high nonlinearity, and discuss the breakup of the nonlinear edge states into solitons.