We report the first experimental observation of self-focusing in walk-off compensanting optical tandems. The observation should open the door t o the exploration of soliton formation in new classes of materials and settings.Multicomponent soliton formation mediated by quadratic nonlinearities offers unique possibilities in soliton science'. However, it faces many important challenges. One of them is the need for spatial and temporal overlap between the multiple interacting waves that are to be trapped and locked together in a single soliton state. This leads to s p e cif~c requirements on the spatial and temporal groupvelocity of the interacting waves, which limit the settings and materials where solitons can be formed. A potential way to overcome such barrier is the realization of soliton packets, in properly engineered tandem structures where the spatial and/or temporal walk-off is reversed periodically. Long-lived self-trapping was numerically predicted to be visible with domain lengths significantly larger than the linear walk-off length z. This makes the actual construction of a tandem structure suitable to test the concept a challenging but feasible task.We employed a 1 cm long tandem made of 10 pieces of potassium titanyl phosphate (KTP) cut for a non-standard geometry, namely Type 11, ow, second-harmonic generation (SHG) along the YZ plane. In this special geometry the walk-off between the two fundamental frequency (FF) waves amounts to the large value p N 1.8" preventing soliton formation with light intensities below the material damage threshold. 0-7803-7888-1/03/$17.0002003 IEEE 489
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