Coupled photorefractive spatial-soliton pairs

We provide a comprehensive experimental and theoretical study of incoherently coupled photorefractive spatial-soliton pairs in all three possible realizations: bright–bright, dark–dark, and dark–bright. We also show that when the total intensity of two coupled solitons is much lower than the effective dark irradiance, the coupled soliton pair is reduced to Manakov solitons. In all cases, mutual trapping of both components in the coupled soliton pair is verified by analyzing, experimentally and numerically, the beam evolution after decoupling.