title: Criteria for the experimental observation of multidimensional optical solitons in saturable media.
abstract: Criteria for experimental observation of multidimensional optical solitons in media with saturable refractive nonlinearities are developed. The criteria are applied to actual material parameters (characterizing the cubic self-focusing and quintic self-defocusing nonlinearities, two-photon loss, and optical-damage threshold) for various glasses. This way, we identify operation windows for soliton formation in these glasses. It is found that two-photon absorption sets stringent limits on the windows. We conclude that, while a well-defined window of parameters exists for two-dimensional solitons (spatial or spatiotemporal), for their three-dimensional spatiotemporal counterparts such a window does not exist, due to the nonlinear loss in glasses.
authors.affiliation: Department of Applied and Engineering Physics, Cornell University, 212 Clark Hall, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA. yc245@cornell.edu
authors.forename: Yi-Fan
authors.initials: YF
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Kale
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Beckwitt
authors.forename: Frank W
authors.initials: FW
authors.lastname: Wise
authors.forename: Boris A
authors.initials: BA
authors.lastname: Malomed