Abstract

Self-trapping of an optical beam occurs when the beam induces, through the nonlinearity, a waveguide structure and, at the same time, is guided in its own induced waveguide.¹ Such beams are commonly referred to as spatial solitons.² A composite soliton occurs when more than one field populates different modes of the induced waveguide. Composite soliton in (2+l) D (which trap in both transverse dimensions) were recently predicted in several forms^3,4 and later observed⁵ for the case of a bell-shaped component jointly trapped with a dipole type component.

© 2001 Optical Society of America