Abstract

Self-guided optical beams, or spatial optical solitons, are the building blocks of all-optical switching devices where light itself guides and steers light without fabricated waveguides¹. In the simplest case, a spatial soliton is created by one beam of a certain polarization and frequency, and it can be viewed as a self-trapped mode of an effective waveguide it induces in a medium².

© 1999 Optical Society of America