Photovoltaic spatial gap solitons in biased photorefractive optical lattices

Abstract

We investigate the existence and characteristics of spatially confined optical gap solitons within an optical lattice embedded in a biased bulk photovoltaic photorefractive crystal. The Floquet-Bloch theory is used to analyze the uniform lattice and derive the optical lattice band structure. In the photonic band gaps, which are typically opaque to light transmission, the photorefractive nonlinearity permits the formation of solitons. The paraxial Helmholtz equation is set up and solved thereby discovering single hump and double hump soliton states in both band gaps. Interestingly, we have not found any multi peak solitons to exist in this particular case. We examine the characteristics of these gap solitons, finding that the soliton width (an indicator of nonlinearity) and intensity depend on their location within the band gap. We find that the magnitude of the external electric field profoundly affects the gap soliton characteristics. Additionally, the Vakhitov-Kolokolov (VK) criterion, perturbation analysis and numerical techniques are used to analyze the stability of the various types of the spatial gap solitons in both the band gaps.