Abstract
We present here a spatial instability, free from longitudinal feedback, in which a beam propagating in one direction in a self-focusing medium breaks up into more and more filaments as the input power is increased.1 These cell-exit patterns (solitary waves) are stable and highly reproducible, showing that they are seeded by fixed phase variations across the input profile and not by random fluctuations. The physics of the formation of the solitary waves is the competition between self-focusing and diffraction leading to the eigenmodes of propagation, i.e., to the solitary-wave solutions of nonlinear Schrödinger-type equations. Our cell-exit spatial patterns are stable, even though they may jitter a little, and are highly reproducible as the input power is scanned up and down. By including the small inherent fixed-phase variations, we reproduced the experimental patterns and bifurcation routes. Consequently, even larger aberrations were intentionally introduced. The instability nature of this phenomenon is emphasized by the slowness (on the order of one second) with which the reproducible pattern is regained after the beam is momentarily interrupted.
© 1991 Optical Society of America
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