We analyze two different physical mechanisms that can stabilize optical vortices in self-focusing nonlinear media which are known to be unstable due to the azimuthal modulational instability. First, we show that vortices become stable in self-focusing nonlinear media with nonlocal nonlinearity. Second, we study optical vortices created by self-trapping of partially incoherent light with a phase dislocation and show that such partially incoherent optical vortices are stabilized when the spatial incoherence of light exceeds a certain threshold value.

Date Published: 11 October 2005
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 5958, Lasers and Applications, 59581M (11 October 2005); doi: 10.1117/12.622545

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 5958:
Lasers and Applications
Krzysztof M. Abramski; Antonio Lapucci; Edward F. Plinski, Editor(s)