Observation of dipole-like gap solitons in self-defocusing waveguide lattices

Opt Lett. 2007 Oct 15;32(20):3011-3. doi: 10.1364/ol.32.003011.

Abstract

We observe dipole-like gap solitons in two-dimensional waveguide lattices optically induced with a self-defocusing nonlinearity. Under appropriate conditions, two mutually coherent input beams excited in neighboring lattice sites evolve into a self-trapped state, whose spatial power spectrum and stability depend strongly on the initial excitation conditions. Our experimental observations are compared with numerical simulations.