Interactions of dark solitons in photovoltaic photorefractive crystals with diffusion nonlinearity

We investigate the interaction of spatial dark optical soliton pair in open-circuit photovoltaic photorefractive crystals by considering the effect of background light and diffusion nonlinearity. We show that the spatial dark solitons repel each other and travel along different trajectories for the coherent interactions that one undergoes reflection and the other one deflects significantly when they are closely overlapped, and the dark solitons attract and deflect simultaneously along a parabolic trajectory for the case of incoherent interactions. The deflection distance depends on the intensities and the initial separation between the dark solitons. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.