title: Optical Spatial Solitons and Their Interactions: Universality and Diversity.
abstract: Spatial solitons, beams that do not spread owing to diffraction when they propagate, have been demonstrated to exist by virtue of a variety of nonlinear self-trapping mechanisms. Despite the diversity of these mechanisms, many of the features of soliton interactions and collisions are universal. Spatial solitons exhibit a richness of phenomena not found with temporal solitons in fibers, including effects such as fusion, fission, annihilation, and stable orbiting in three dimensions. Here the current state of knowledge on spatial soliton interactions is reviewed.
authors.affiliation: School of Optics and CREOL, University of Central Florida, 4000 Central Florida Boulevard, Orlando, FL 32826-2700, USA. Physics Department and Solid State Institute, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 32000, Israel. Electrical Engineering Department and Center for Photonics and Opto-Electronic Materials (POEM), Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.
authors.initials: GI
authors.lastname: Stegeman
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Segev