Anti-dark spatial solitons with incoherent light

Summary form only given. We demonstrate, for the first time to our knowledge, stable partially incoherent anti-dark solitons in non-instantaneous nonlinear media. Experimental results and computer simulations indicate that the instability affecting an anti-dark soliton can be totally eliminated by properly engineering the incoherence of its background beam with respect to the threshold required for the onset of incoherent modulation instability (MI). The modal structure of the anti-dark states is analyzed in case where the nonlinearity is of the Kerr type. These anti-dark solitons are the only known soliton solutions that have non-zero intensity everywhere in space yet they propagate in a stable fashion in a self-focusing medium.