Dancing light: Counterpropagating beams in photorefractive crystals

A review of work on the dynamical behavior of counterpropagating incoherent laser beams in photorefractive crystals is presented. Numerical study of counterpropagating beams of different type is carried out, in both space and time, using an appropriate theoretical model. The development of patterns in broad hyper-Gaussian counterpropagating beams in saturable Kerr-like media is investigated, by varying the width of beams. Rotational properties of counterpropagating mutually incoherent self-trapped vortex beams in optically induced fixed photonic lattices are also investigated numerically. One of the fundamental quantum mechanical phenomena is observed for the counterpropagating beams in photonic lattices, the tunneling of light from the first to the higher-order bands of the lattice band gap spectrum. The transfer of angular momentum from vortex beams to optically induced photonic lattices is also demonstrated. For the interacting beams it is found that the sum of angular momenta of counterpropagating components is not a conserved quantity, but the difference is. In the fixed lattices there is always a considerable loss of angular momentum.