Interactions between self-accelerating beams in photorefractive media

We investigate interactions between in-phase or out-of-phase Airy beams and nonlinear accelerating beams in photorefractive crystals by means of direct numerical simulations. Since self-accelerating beams possess infinite energy, we evaluated the propagation of two shifted counter beams by truncating the oscillating tails. The numerical results show that the external bias electric field has a profound effect on the propagation dynamics and the solitons shed from the Airy beam. We also found that during interactions between two nonlinear accelerating beams, single solitons, soliton pairs, and bound breathing solitons were produced. When the nonlinear accelerating beam collides with a soliton beam, the main lobe continues accelerating while the soliton intensity fluctuates with the lobes. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America