All-optical switching of a signal by a pair of interacting nematicons

We investigate a power tunable junction formed by two interacting spatial solitons self-trapped in nematic liquid crystals. By launching a counter-propagating copolarized probe we assess the guided-wave behavior induced by the solitons and demonstrate a novel all-optical switch. Varying soliton power the probe gets trapped into one or two or three guided-waves by the soliton-induced index perturbation, an effect supported by the nonlocal nonlinearity.We acknowledge support from the Australian Research Council