Taming the Collapse of Optical Fields

Field collapse, which occurs in various nonlinear systems, has attracted much attention, owing to its universality, complexity, and applicability. A great challenge and expectation is to achieve the controllable and designable collapsing pattern. Here we predict theoretically and demonstrate experimentally the novel collapsing behaviors of the vector optical fields in a self-focusing Kerr medium. Surprisingly, the results reveal that the collapse of the vector optical field is controllable and designable by engineering the distribution of hybrid states of polarization, and has the robust feature insensitive to the random noise. Our idea has its significance which it opens a new window for manipulating the optical field and the different kinds of field, and then facilitates to push the related researches.