Gray photorefractive polymeric optical spatial solitons

We show that gray spatial optical solitons are possible in biased photorefractive polymers under steady-state conditions. We find that for a given material parameter the absolute value of a gray photorefractive polymeric soliton's phase decreases with an increase in the beam's grayness, whereas it increases with the material parameter for a given beam's grayness and that the full width half maximum (FWHM) of the gray soliton beam's intensity increases with the beam's grayness when the normalized background intensity and the material parameter are fixed and decreases with an increase in the normalized background intensity when the material parameter is fixed. On the other hand, we also show that N coupled beam evolution equations in biased photorefractive polymers can exhibit multicomponent gray solitons. These multicomponent gray solitons can be obtained provided that the N coupled beams share the same polarization, wavelength, and are incoherent with one another. The characteristics and stability properties of these multicomponent gray solitons arc also discussed in detail. Crown Copyright (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved