Abstract

We demonstrate that optical spatial solitons with non-rectilinear trajectories can be made to propagate in a uniaxial dielectric with a transversely modulated orientation of the optic axis. Exploiting the reorientational nonlinearity of nematic liquid crystals and imposing a linear variation of the background alignment of the molecular director, we observe solitons whose trajectories have either a monotonic or a non-monotonic curvature in the observation plane of propagation, depending on either the synergistic or counteracting roles of wavefront distortion and birefringent walk-off, respectively. The observed effect is well modelled in the weakly nonlinear regime using momentum conservation of the self-collimated beams in the presence of the spatial nonlocality of the medium response. Since reorientational solitons can act as passive waveguides for other weak optical signals, these results introduce a wealth of possibilities for all-optical signal routing and light-induced photonic interconnects.

Details

Title
Curved optical solitons subject to transverse acceleration in reorientational soft matter
Author
Laudyn, Urszula A 1 ; Kwaśny, Michał 1 ; Sala, Filip A 1 ; Karpierz, Mirosław A 1 ; Smyth, Noel F 2   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Assanto, Gaetano 3   VIAFID ORCID Logo 

 Warsaw University of Technology, Faculty of Physics, Warsaw, Poland 
 University of Edinburgh, School of Mathematics, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK 
 University of Rome “Roma Tre”, NooEL— Nonlinear Optics and OptoElectronics Lab, Rome, Italy; Tampere University of Technology, Photonics Lab, Tampere, FI, Finland 
Pages
1-12
Publication year
2017
Publication date
Sep 2017
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
e-ISSN
20452322
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
1957776752
Copyright
© 2017. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.