We demonstrate, for the first time, optical guidance of light beams using incoherent light. Such guidance is made possible by generating self-trapped dark beams (dark spatial solitons) inside a bulk photorefractive material using spatially incoherent light. We show that, in the 1D case, planar or Y-splitting waveguides induced by self-trapped incoherence dark stripes can guide other coherent light of a different wavelength. In the 2D case, incoherent dark solitons generated from optical vortices induce refractive- index changes akin to circular channel waveguides. These experiments introduce the possibility of controlling high- power laser beams with low-power incoherent light sources such as Light Emitting Diodes.

Date Published: 19 July 1999
PDF: 2 pages
Proc. SPIE 3749, 18th Congress of the International Commission for Optics, (19 July 1999); doi: 10.1117/12.354775

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 3749:
18th Congress of the International Commission for Optics
Alexander J. Glass; Joseph W. Goodman; Milton Chang; Arthur H. Guenther; Toshimitsu Asakura, Editor(s)