Abstract

As well known, the nonlinear interaction between two intense laser beams, counter-propagating in isotropic nonlinear dielectrics may induce spatio-temporal polarization instabilities. Such instabilities lead, on the one hand, to severe degradations of the beam quality in optical devices; on the other hand, they may be exploited for novel all-optical switching, storage and interconnect applications. Indeed, in 1987 Zakharov and Mikhailov [1] predicted that the polarization instability of counterpropagating beams leads to stable domain walls, in analogy with ferromagnetics. Earlier preliminary experiments revealed cross-polarization switching of counterpropagating beams leading to domain wall structures [2].

© 2000 IEEE