Note to users. If you're seeing this message, it means that your browser cannot find this page's style/presentation instructions -- or possibly that you are using a browser that does not support current Web standards. Find out more about why this message is appearing, and what you can do to make your experience of our site the best it can be.

Science 19 November 1999:
Vol. 286. no. 5444, pp. 1518 - 1523
DOI: 10.1126/science.286.5444.1518
Prev | Table of Contents | Next

Review

Optical Spatial Solitons and Their Interactions: Universality and Diversity

George I. Stegeman, 1 Mordechai Segev 23

Spatial solitons, beams that do not spread owing to diffraction when they propagate, have been demonstrated to exist by virtue of a variety of nonlinear self-trapping mechanisms. Despite the diversity of these mechanisms, many of the features of soliton interactions and collisions are universal. Spatial solitons exhibit a richness of phenomena not found with temporal solitons in fibers, including effects such as fusion, fission, annihilation, and stable orbiting in three dimensions. Here the current state of knowledge on spatial soliton interactions is reviewed.

1 School of Optics and CREOL, University of Central Florida, 4000 Central Florida Boulevard, Orlando, FL 32826-2700, USA.
2 Physics Department and Solid State Institute, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 32000, Israel.
3 Electrical Engineering Department and Center for Photonics and Opto-Electronic Materials (POEM), Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.

Read the Full Text


THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
Solitonets: complex networks of interacting fields.
I. Kaminer, M. Segev, A. M Bruckstein, and Y. C Eldar (2009)
Proc R Soc A 465, 1093-1101
   Abstract »    Full Text »    PDF »
Soliton Self-Frequency Shift Cancellation in Photonic Crystal Fibers.
D. V. Skryabin, F. Luan, J. C. Knight, and P. St. J. Russell (2003)
Science 301, 1705-1708
   Abstract »    Full Text »    PDF »
Clustering of solitons in weakly correlated wavefronts..
Z. Chen, S. M. Sears, H. Martin, D. N. Christodoulides, and M. Segev (2002)
PNAS 99, 5223-5227
   Abstract »    Full Text »    PDF »
Modulation Instability and Pattern Formation in Spatially Incoherent Light Beams.
D. Kip, M. Soljacic, M. Segev, E. Eugenieva, and D. N. Christodoulides (2000)
Science 290, 495-498
   Abstract »    Full Text »
Frontiers in Ultrashort Pulse Generation: Pushing the Limits in Linear and Nonlinear Optics.
G. Steinmeyer, D. H. Sutter, L. Gallmann, N. Matuschek, and U. Keller (1999)
Science 286, 1507-1512
   Abstract »    Full Text »


To Advertise     Find Products

Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)