Interaction of Airy beams in photorefractive media

We investigate numerical interactions between two Airy beams with different relative phases in photorefractive (PR) nonlinear media in one transverse dimension. It is shown that solitons and soliton pairs are generated that are not accelerating, although the incident beams exhibit acceleration property. When the relative phase is very small, the attraction between the two Airy beams is strengthened and their propagation behavior is similar to that in in-phase case, where the two Airy beams attract each other and the main lobes can fuse into one single breathing soliton, secondary lobes can generate soliton pairs with symmetric intensity distribution. While the relative phase is close to pi, these beams present out-phase propagation with strong repulsive effect. Their interaction properties are sensitive to both the interval and relative phase between the two Airy beams.