Azimuthal instabilities and self-breaking of beams into sets of solitons in bulk second-harmonic generation

Abstract

The authors investigate numerically the process of second-harmonic generation of light in bulk quadratic nonlinear media with input beams containing phase dislocations. The authors find that above a threshold light intensity, the input beams self-split into several pieces along the azimuthal direction and form sets of spatial solitons.