Theoretical investigation of photorefractive spatial solitons temporal behavior, the route to SHG enhancement and switching applications.

Photorefractive spatial solitons have recently been the object of intense fundamental research. This paper proposes two applications of this interesting low power phenomenon. Photorefractive self-focusing can indeed be used to enhance nonlinear processes such as wavelength conversion. Furthermore, its sensitivity to low power optical beams makes it a good candidate towards all optical switching and computing, provided the time response issues have been solved. This paper proposes a switching technology with optical powers on the scale of a few mW/cm(2) and provides strong hints towards solving the photorefractive time response issue.