Abstract

Interactions of optical solitons are of fundamental interest for potential applications in reconfigurable optical devices. While in the copropagating geometry soliton interaction only results in non-transient dynamics due to the one-sided boundary conditions, infinite dynamics is possible in the counterpropagating geometry [1]. These unstable dynamics limit the potential applications of counterpropagating solitons for waveguide couplers. Therefore, ways to control and suppress this dynamics are needed. In this work, we demonstrate experimentally the suppression of instabilities of counterpropagating solitons in one (ID) and two-dimensional (2D) periodic photonic lattices. We study the dependence of the soliton instability on the lattice depth and periodicity and identify optimal parameters for stabilisation.

© 2007 IEEE