Abstract

Periodic optical materials offer a unique landscape to control the propagation of light [1]. In the presence of uniform nonlinearity such materials give rise to standard lattice solitons. However, the current technological state-of- the-art allows relatively deep simultaneous modulation of the linear refractive index and nonlinearity coefficient of the material. In this work we show that lattices with out-of-phase modulations of refractive index and nonlinearity result in structural transformations of shapes, drastic modification of stability properties, and transverse mobility of solitons when the nonlinearity, diffraction and refractive index modulation compete on similar footing. We discuss here the properties of fundamental solitons [2] and vortices [3] in one- and two-dimensional lattices with out-ofphase modulation of nonlinearity and refractive index.

© 2009 IEEE