Coherent soliton collisions in photorefractive semiconductor InP:Fe for reconfigurable optical communications

Experimental 2D solitonic coherent interactions between two parallel beams in photorefractive iron doped indium phosphide (InP:Fe) will be presented. These measurements will be discussed taking into account the dependency on the relative distance between the beams, the light intensity and the temperature. This methodology is very attractive as regards both the employed wavelengths and the possibility of obtaining an all-optical dynamical reconfigurability of the induced guiding structures. In the following we will refer to two interacting beams with lambda = 1.064 mum but self-trapping in this material has been demonstrated also at lambda = 1.3 mum and at lambda = 1.55 mum so useful to work in the third window for telecommunications.