Wiggling and bending-free micron-sized solitons in periodically biased photorefractives

Considering nonlinear optical propagation through photore-fractive crystals in which the bias voltage is periodically modulated along the propagation direction, we are able to identify the conditions in which a beam forms a soliton in a straight line down to micron-sized widths. The effect, which is numerically investigated considering the full (3+1)D spatio-temporal light-matter dynamics, emerges when the period of modulation of the bias is smaller than the beam diffraction length. In conditions in which the two scales are comparable, the soliton follows a characteristic wiggling trajectory, oscillating in response to the oscillating bias. The finding indicates a method to achieve highly miniaturized soliton-based photonic applications that do not require specific off-axis alignment.