Stabilization and breakup of coupled dipole-mode beams in an anisotropic nonlinear medium

We study the mutual trapping of two dipole-mode light beams in a medium with a nonlocal anisotropic saturable nonlinearity. It is shown that the incoherent attraction of perpendicularly aligned dipole-mode beams leads to the stabilization of their composite structure. Our numerical analysis gives a stationary solution that is stable only with respect to small amplitude modulations. The coupled solitary structure disintegrates in a well-defined way when the numerical perturbations or the experimental propagation length exceeds a certain limit. In this case a new and more robust, multicomponent solitary transverse light structure consisting of two dipole-mode vector solitons will be generated. (C) 2002 Optical Society of America.