Abstract
Spatial solitons are beams that do not diffract by virtue of a strong nonlinear interaction with the medium in which they propagate.[1] Quadratic solitons are a rather special member of the spatial soliton family because their existence is not linked to a self- induced refractive index change and subsequent guiding of the beam by the induced waveguide. Instead they exist by virtue of the strong coupling via the second order nonlinearity χ(2) between beams of different frequencies.[2] For example, for Type I second harmonic generation (SHG) in which there is a single fundamental and harmonic beam, the beams exchange photons with propagation distance leading to mutual self- trapping. Although such solitons were predicted back in the 1970s, they were not observed experimentally until the mid 1990s. [2–4] Over the last five years there has been a great deal of experimental progress in this field and the purpose of this chapter is to review some aspects of this work. (A separate chapter by Sukhorukov in this book deals with the details of the theory of quadratic solitons and related effects.)
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Stegeman, G.I. (2001). Experiments on Quadratic Solitons. In: Boardman, A.D., Sukhorukov, A.P. (eds) Soliton-driven Photonics. NATO Science Series, vol 31. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0682-8_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0682-8_2
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