Optical discrete solitons in waveguide arrays 2 Dynamic properties

An AlGaAs waveguide array below the half-bandgap is used to investigate experimentally basic dynamic features of discrete systems. In particular, nonlinear locking of a discrete soliton to its input waveguide was observed for certain input conditions. We also investigated the soliton dynamics as a function of the position of the initial excitation and found that small shifts from the centers of symmetries of the structure could be greatly enhanced. Both effects depend on the geometry of the array and on the beam size.