Abstract

We numerically investigate interactions between two bright or dark incoherent localized beams in a strontium barium niobate photorefractive crystal in one dimension, using the coherent density method. For the case of bright beams, if the interacting beams are in-phase, they attract each other during propagation and form bound breathers; if out-of-phase, the beams repel each other and fly away. The bright incoherent beams do not radiate much and form long-lived, well-defined breathers or quasi-stable solitons. If the phase difference is $\pi /2$, the interacting beams may both attract or repel each other, depending on the interval between the two beams, the beam widths, and the degree of coherence. For the case of dark incoherent beams, in addition to the above, the interactions also depend on the symmetry of the incident beams. As already known, an even-symmetric incident beam tends to split into a doublet, whereas an odd-symmetric incident beam tends to split into a triplet. When launched in pairs, the dark beams display dynamics consistent with such a picture and in general obey soliton-like conservation laws, so that the collisions are mostly elastic, leading to little energy and momentum exchange. But they also radiate and breathe while propagating. In all the cases, the smaller the interval between the two interacting beams, the stronger the mutual interaction. On the other hand, the larger the degree of incoherence, the weaker the interaction.

© 2014 Optical Society of America

Anisotropic interaction of three-dimensional spatial screening solitons

A. Stepken, F. Kaiser, and M. R. Belić
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 17(1) 68-77 (2000)

Coupled photorefractive spatial-soliton pairs

Zhigang Chen, Mordechai Segev, Tamer H. Coskun, Demetrios N. Christodoulides, and Yuri S. Kivshar
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 14(11) 3066-3077 (1997)

Experimental investigation of phase-dependent interactions of photovoltaic bright spatial solitons in photorefractive Fe:LiNbO3

Wing Kee Lee and Tak Shun Chan
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 23(9) 1920-1924 (2006)

Three-dimensional optical beam propagation and solitons in photorefractive crystals

Bruno Crosignani, Paolo Di Porto, Antonio Degasperis, Mordechai Segev, and Stefano Trillo
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 14(11) 3078-3090 (1997)

Interactions between self-accelerating beams in photorefractive media

Meizhi Zhang, Guangwen Huo, Hua Zhong, and Zhanqiang Hui
Opt. Express 25(18) 22104-22112 (2017)