Beam steering in a nonlocal medium with inhomogeneous nonlinearity

Abstract

We address the dynamics of out-of-phase soliton pairs and dipole solitons in a nonlocal medium with inhomogeneous nonlinearity, and demonstrate their self-splitting into two individual solitons. We reveal that this self-splitting strongly depends on the variation of the longitudinal nonlinearity and it can be employed for efficient control of the soliton trajectories. We also demonstrate that the index waveguide, which is induced by the soliton pairs and the dipole soliton bound state, yields a family of special waveguides and beam splitters for trapped linear beams. Interestingly, the switching efficiency of this beam splitter could be controlled by adjustment of the longitudinal nonlinearity.