All-optical switching of a signal by a pair of interacting nematicons

Ya. V. Izdebskaya, J. Rebling, A. S. Desyatnikov, G. Assanto, and Yu. S. Kivshar

Opt. Express 20 (22), 24701 (2012)

Abstract:

We investigate a power tunable junction formed by two interacting spatial solitons self-trapped in nematic liquid crystals. By launching a counter-propagating copolarized probe we assess the guided-wave behavior induced by the solitons and demonstrate a novel all-optical switch. Varying soliton power the probe gets trapped into one or two or three guided-waves by the soliton-induced index perturbation, an effect supported by the nonlocal nonlinearity.