Dynamic instability of self-induced bidirectional waveguides in photorefractive media

We report on the experimental observation of a dynamic instability in the interaction of counterpropagating self-trapped beams in a photorefractive strontium barium niobate crystal. While the interaction of copropagating spatial optical solitons exhibits only transient dynamics, resulting in a final steady state, the counterpropagating geometry supports a dynamic instability mediated by intrinsic feedback Experimental observations are compared with and found to be in qualitative agreement with numerical simulations. (c) 2005 Optical Society of America.