Demonstration of surface soliton arrays at the edge of a two-dimensional photonic lattice

Abstract

We demonstrate surface soliton arrays at the interface between a homogeneous medium and an optically induced two-dimensional semi-infinite photonic lattice. These are nonlinear Tamm-like surface states localized in one but extended periodically in the other transverse dimension. Both in-phase and staggered out-of-phase soliton arrays are observed, and the experimental results are corroborated by numerical simulations.