COUPLED PHOTOREFRACTIVE SPATIAL-SOLITON PAIRS

We provide a comprehensive experimental and theoretical study of incoh erently coupled photorefractive spatial-soliton pairs in all three pos sible realizations: bright-bright, dark-dark, and dark-bright. We also show that when the total intensity of two coupled solitons is much lo wer than the effective dark irradiance, the coupled soliton pair is re duced to Manakov solitons. In all cases, mutual trapping of both compo nents in the coupled soliton pair is verified by analyzing, experiment ally and numerically, the beam evolution after decoupling. (C) 1997 Op tical Society of America.