Soliton Shape and Mobility Control in Optical Lattices

We present a progress overview focused on the recent theoretical and experimental advances in the area of soliton manipulation in optical lattices. Optical lattices offer the possibility to engineer and to control the diffraction of light beams in media with periodically-modulated optical properties, to manage the corresponding reflection and transmission bands, and to form specially designed defects. Consequently, they afford the existence of a rich variety of new families of nonlinear stationary waves and solitons, lead to new rich dynamical phenomena, and offer novel conceptual opportunities for all-optical shaping, switching and routing of optical signals encoded in soliton formats. In this overview, we consider reconfigurable optically-induced lattices as well as waveguide arrays made in suitable nonlinear materials. We address both, one-dimensional and multi-dimensional geometries. We specially target the new possibilities made possible by optical lattices induced by a variety of existing nondiffracting light patterns, we address nonlinear lattices and soliton arrays, and we briefly explore the unique features exhibited by light propagation in defect modes and in random lattices, an area of current topical interest and of potential cross-disciplinary impact. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.