Abstract

Beam self-focusing and self-trapping in photorefractive media are, for a decade, deeply studied subjects, at least as far as the photorefractive steady state is concerned. Indeed, photorefractive materials are known to allow beam self-focusing or defocusing, leading to the possible prediction and observation of spatial solitons. Insight into the process of their build-up has also been obtained theoretically and experimentally. Although most of the work reported in literature deals with continuous wave laser beams at low power level, the recent literature reports that self-focusing leading to spatial solitons occurs in photorefractive media under repetitive pulsed illumination, in accordance with previously developed theoretical predictions.

© 2001 EPS