Abstract

Dark spatial soliton propagation phenomena have been the subject of intense interest recently, in part because of their potential application to optical switching. Previously, we reported observing the excitation of fundamental dark spatial solitons and transversely counter-propagating pairs of nonfundamental dark spatial solitons, excited by odd and even initial conditions, respectively. These observations were made in bulk, single-crystal ZnSe by using 30-ps, 532-nm optical pulses. In this paper, we extend that work to show quantitative agreement between our experimental measurements of the collisional shift and the Zakharov and Shabat 2-D theory. Such collisional shifts will be important in most proposed optical switching applications.

© 1991 Optical Society of America