We have found various families of two-dimensional spatiotemporal solitons in quadratically nonlinear waveguide arrays. The families of unstaggered odd, even, and twisted stationary solutions are thoroughly characterized and their stability against perturbations is investigated. We show that the twisted and even solitons display instability, while most of the odd solitons show remarkable stabili...

We report experimental observation of bound states formed by two well-separated vector spatial solitons as the result of a force balance between vector-soliton components. We also demonstrate a link between such soliton bound states and two-hump, two-mode solitons, along with the induced coherence effect observed for incoherently interacting solitons.

We study the generation of dark-pulse solitons in nonlinear-optical fibers in the normal dispersion regime. We demonstrate that dark solitons may be created as pairs by an arbitrary dark pulse without a threshold and obtain the parameters of the generated solitons. The cases of soliton creation by a boxlike dark pulse and a random Gaussian pulse are also described.

We demonstrate experimentally and theoretically random-phase surface solitons in effectively instantaneous nonlinear media. The key mechanism for self-trapping is played by a nonlocal nature of the nonlinearity, in contrast to other incoherent solitons involving time averaging. These incoherent surface solitons display features different from their bulk counterparts and from other surface waves.

Localized nonlinear modes, or solitons, are obtained for the two-dimensional nonlinear Schrödinger equation with various external potentials that possess large variations from periodicity, i.e., vacancy defects, edge dislocations, and quasicrystal structure. The solitons are obtained by employing a spectral fixed-point computational scheme. Investigation of soliton evolution by direct numerical...

We analyze the salient features of vortex-ring solitons supported by cylindrically symmetric media with nonlocal thermal nonlinearity. We discover the existence of a maximum allowed topological charge for such vortex solitons to be stable on propagation: Only vortex-ring solitons with topological charge m </= 2 are found to be stable. This remarkable result holds independently of the radius of ...

We introduce novel types of spatial vector soliton that can be generated in anisotropic optical media, such as tetragonal crystals with third-order nonlinear susceptibility. We demonstrate that these vector solitons provide a nontrivial generalization to both conventional vector solitons of birefringent cubic media and parametric solitons supported by third-order cascaded nonlinearities.

We present the experimental observation of scalar multipole solitons in highly nonlocal nonlinear media, including dipole, tripole, quadrupole, and necklace-type solitons, organized as arrays of out-of-phase bright spots. These complex solitons are metastable, but with a large parameters range where the instability is weak, permitting their experimental observation.

We consider two solitons propagating under a filter-control scheme and describe the timing jitter that is caused by spontaneous-emission noise and enhanced by attraction between solitons. We find the bit-error rate as a function of system parameters (filtering and noise level), timing, initial distance, and the phase difference between solitons.

We study temporal modulational instability of spatial discrete solitons in waveguide arrays with group velocity dispersion (GVD). For normal GVD we report existence of the strong 'neck'-type instability specific for the discrete solitons. For anomalous GVD the instability leads to formation of the mixed discrete-continuous spatio-temporal quasi-solitons. Feasibility of experimental observation ...