Abstract

A photorefractive oscillator (PRO) is a nonlinear optical cavity containing a photorefractive crystal. PROs are highly versatile devices for the study of topics in nonlinear dynamics, especially the formation and control of optical dissipative structures like spatial solitons, vortices, and periodic patterns. In a unidirectionally pumped PRO, the emitted radiation has continuous phase symmetry, and the field phase is free. When the cavity has a large enough Fresnel number so that dissipative structures appear, the continuous phase symmetry leads to the appearance of vortices in the transversal plane to the cavity axis. Vortices are points of null intensity around which the field phase rotates by 2mπ with m integer.

© 2015 IEEE