Abstract

Thus far, dark soldons have been studied using spatially coherent light beams only. However, nature is full of incoherent light as well as coherent light, or, in a broad sense, many sources of electromagnetic radiation emit spa- daily incoherent light. Recently, our group has demonstrated that bright beams from a spa- daily incoherent light source can form incoherent soldons in noninstantaneous nonlinear media.¹·² Can such incoherent beams support dark solitons? Self-trapping of incoherent beams is important not only for possible applications of controlling coherent light by incoherent light [such as using light from light- emitting diodes (LEDs) to control laser beams] but also for addressing many fundamental issues.^2-4 For instance, the statistics of a self-trapped incoherent beam can be controlled by the self-trapping process.^4,5 Here we believe we report the first experimental observation of self-trapping of spatially incoherent dark beams in the form of one-dimensional dark stripes (as predicted recently in Ref. 5) and of two-dimensional dark vortices.

© 1998 Optical Society of America