Curved optical solitons subject to transverse acceleration in reorientational soft matter

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific reports 2017-09, Vol.7 (1), p.12385-12, Article 12385
Main Authors: Laudyn, Urszula A., Kwaśny, Michał, Sala, Filip A., Karpierz, Mirosław A., Smyth, Noel F., Assanto, Gaetano
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
639/624/399/919
639/624/400/385
Crystals
Electric fields
Humanities and Social Sciences
Light
Light effects
multidisciplinary
Nonlinear systems
Optics
Photonics
Propagation
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
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Summary: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.
ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/s41598-017-12242-5