Experimental Observation of Modulation Instability and Optical Spatial Soliton Arrays in Soft Condensed Matter

Abstract

In this Letter we report observations of optically induced self-organization of colloidal arrays in the presence of un-patterned counter-propagating evanescent waves. The colloidal arrays formed along the laser propagation-axis are shown to be linked to the break-up of the incident field into optical spatial solitons, the lateral spacing of the arrays being related to modulation instability of the soft condensed matter system.

16 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Patterns and Collective Behavior in Granular Media: Theoretical Concepts
• Two-dimensional solitons on the surface of magnetic fluids
• Optical spatial solitons in soft-matter: mode coupling theory approach
• Laser beam filamentation in fractal aggregates

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