Collisions of orthogonally polarized spatial solitons in AlGaAs slab waveguides

The effects of refractive anisotropy and induced birefringence on spatial soliton collisions in an AlGaAs slab waveguide are studied for the two crystal-growth planes [001] and [111]. A detailed numerical study of the interaction dynamics as a function of crystal orientation and for varying degrees of linear birefringence is reported. The anisotropic nonlinear regime is studied in the context of soliton interactions, and the dependence of phase-mismatched parametric processes on linear birefringence is used to propose a novel birefringence-managed switching architecture.