We report on experimental observations of nonlinear optical waveguides and waveguide arrays formed by incoherent light in photorefractive materials. Such waveguides are made possible by creating partially spatially incoherent solitons in a noninstantaneous self-focusing photorefractive medium. In addition to planar, Y-junction, and circular waveguides, we report the first demonstration of pixel...

Imaging technologies such as dynamic viewpoint generation are engineered for incoherent radiation using the traditional light field, and for coherent radiation using electromagnetic field theory. We present a model of coherent image formation that strikes a balance between the utility of the light field and the comprehensive predictive power of Maxwell's equations. We synthesize research in opt...

We report on the experimental observation of modulation instability of partially spatially incoherent light beams in noninstantaneous nonlinear media and show that in such systems patterns can form spontaneously from noise. Incoherent modulation instability occurs above a specific threshold that depends on the coherence properties (correlation distance) of the wave packet and leads to a periodi...

Imaging technologies such as dynamic viewpoint generation are engineered for incoherent radiation using the traditional light field, and for coherent radiation using electromagnetic field theory. We present a model of coherent image formation that strikes a balance between the utility of the light field and the comprehensive predictive power of Maxwell’s equations. We synthesize research in opt...

We report what is to our knowledge the first observation of pixellike spatial solitons from partially spatially incoherent light. We created an array of as many as 32x32 soliton pixels by launching a spatially modulated incoherent light beam into a noninstantaneous self-focusing photorefraction medium. These solitons were stable and robust, forming a steady-state two-dimensional waveguide array...

We report the observation of modulational instability (MI) of a partially spatially incoherent beam induced by seeding noise through cross-phase modulation. We show experimentally that a threshold exists for such induced incoherent MI to occur that depends on the degree of spatial coherence as well as on the strength of the nonlinearity. Above threshold, the induced MI leads to the formation of...

We demonstrate the use of a femtosecond pulse-shaping apparatus for electronically programmable phase filtering of amplified spontaneous emission from an erbium-doped fiber amplifier. Pulse shaping applied to a broadband incoherent light (noise) input results in reshaped noise, with a specially tailored electric field correlation function. Our experiments clearly reveal that phase filtering can...