Polarization interactions in multi-component defocusing media

We study dark-bright soliton interactions in multi-component media such as nonlinear optical media in the defocusing regime and repulsive Bose-Einstein condensates. This is achieved using the recently developed formalism of the inverse scattering transform for the defocusing multi-component nonlinear Schrödinger equation with non-zero boundary conditions. We show that, generically, these interactions result in a non-trivial polarization shift for the bright components. We compute such polarization shift analytically and compare it to that in focusing two-component nonlinear Schrödinger systems.