Beam interactions in one-dimensional saturable waveguide arrays

The interaction between two parallel beams in one-dimensional discrete saturable systems has been investigated using lithium niobate nonlinear waveguide arrays. When the beams are separated by one channel and in phase it is possible to observe soliton fusion at low power levels. This result is confirmed numerically. By increasing the power, solitonlike propagation of weakly coupled beams occurs. When the beams are out-of-phase the most interesting numerically obtained result is the existence of oscillations which resemble the recently discovered Tamm oscillations