Spatiotemporal dynamics of counterpropagating Airy beams

We analyse theoretically the spatiotemporal dynamics of two incoherent counterpropagating Airy beams interacting in a photorefractive crystal under focusing conditions. For a large enough nonlinearity strength the interaction between the two Airy beams leads to light-induced waveguiding. The stability of the waveguide is determined by the crystal length, the nonlinearity strength and the beam’s intensities and is improved when comparing to the situation using Gaussian beams. We further identify the threshold above which the waveguide is no longer static but evolves dynamically either time-periodically or even chaotically. Above the stability threshold, each Airy-soliton moves erratically between privileged output positions that correspond to the spatial positions of the lobes of the counterpropagating Airy beam. These results suggest new ways of creating dynamically varying waveguides, optical logic gates and chaos-based computing.