Abstract
We report on the experimental observation of a dynamic instability in the interaction of counterpropagating self-trapped beams in a photorefractive strontium barium niobate crystal. While the interaction of copropagating spatial optical solitons exhibits only transient dynamics, resulting in a final steady state, the counterpropagating geometry supports a dynamic instability mediated by intrinsic feedback. Experimental observations are compared with and found to be in qualitative agreement with numerical simulations.
© 2005 Optical Society of America
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