Generation of periodic arrays of dark spatial solitons in the regime of effective amplification

Abstract

The generation of dark spatial optical solitons is of current interest because of their potential application to devices such as writing of waveguide structures and beam scanning for optical interconnects [1-3]. For such applications, it is important to have clean solitons without nonsoliton components. Current soliton generation techniques lead also to radiation fields (noise) due to the difficulty in producing precisely the initial conditions for launching [3]. In this paper we show that dark spatial soliton arrays can be launched through the adiabatic evolution of a simple interference pattern. The blackness of the solitons can be easily governed by changing the mutual intensity of the two interfering beams.