Controlled soliton formation in tailored Bessel photonic lattices

Azimuthally modulated higher order rotationally symmetric Bessel-like optical patterns were generated by coherent superposition of two co-propagating Bessel beams - either in or out of phase. By changing the distance between the beam centers, a whole variety of transition states can be realized. As one prominent example, a 4-fold symmetry quadrupole-like photonic structure was optically inducted in an SBN crystal and nonlinear beam propagation in such a photonic wave-guiding structure is investigated in both self-focusing and self-defocusing regimes. The proposed device serves as an all-optical 2d 1 × 4 photonic interconnect.