Laser beam self-splitting into solitons by optical Kerr nonlinearity

Abstract

The presented experiment consists in the high intensity picosecond excitation of a bulk Kerr medium by sinusoidal interference patterns of high spatial frequency. These patterns generate light-induced Bragg refractive index gratings exhibiting nearly periodic self-organization of the well-known catastrophic break-up of the laser beam. Thus, self-focusing leads to self-trapped structures, whose features satisfactorily agree with shapes and intensities of a set of fundamental soliton beams.