The fundamental nature of the solutions to the nonlinear Schrödinger Equations changes when discreteness is introduced. The system is no longer integrable which means that in the optics domain coupling of the soliton-like solutions to radiation fields occurs. In fact, optics provides a near-ideal testbed for studying experimentally nonlinear beam propagation in discrete systems.
Experiments have been performed in linear arrays of the semiconductor AlGaAs channel waveguides in which the adjacent channels are weakly coupled by the evanescent fields associated with the individual channels. The experiments were performed with photon energies just below one half the semiconductor’s bandgap where the dominant optical nonlinearity is Kerr in nature. Two experiments will be discussed, one in which two orthogonally polarized beams are incident on the sample lead to a vector discrete solitons and the second in which two co-polarized beams, with field overlap in their tails, are excited in the array.
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