Abstract

Recently, Ryan and Agrawal proposed a new technique that employs spatial phase modulation of a beam entering a nonlinear media and showed that high-efficiency beam steering is possible.¹ Spatial phase modulation splits the input beam into many subbeams, while the nonlinear medium shapes a particular sub-beam into a spatial soliton in such a way that most of the beam power appears in a narrow beam whose direction can be controlled by changing the modulation parameters. It is important to know the optimal condition for beam steering and the conditions under which the phase modulation will not destroy the soliton propagation. The purpose of this work is to study the conditions under which the beam deflection is most efficient without destroying the soliton propagation in the nonlinear medium.

© 1994 Optical Society of America