Abstract

Spatial solitons and soliton interaction have attracted substantial research interest recently. Before stable 2D spatial solitons were discovered, the study of soliton interaction was limited to the unconstrained transverse dimension and the longitudinal dimension. Recently, stable 2D spatial solitons have enabled us to observe full 2 + 1D soliton interaction.^1-3 In particular, collisions of 2 + 1D solitons were studies for photorefractive solitons¹ and for solitons in a saturable nonlinearity,² The latter has also reported 3D spiraling of bright spatial solitons, when the solitons were generated from the breakup of an input vortex beam. The vortex has carried initial angular momentum whose conservation has forced the bright soliton pair to spiral while moving away from each other.

© 1997 Optical Society of America