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Observation Of Double-Charge Discrete Vortex Solitons In Hexagonal Photonic Lattices, B Terhalle, T Richter, Kjh Law, D Gories, P Rose, Tj Alexander, Pg Kevrekidis, As Desyatnikov, W Krolikowski, F Kaiser, C Denz, Ys Kivshar

Panos Kevrekidis

We report on the experimental observation of stable double-charge discrete vortex solitons generated in hexagonal photonic lattices created optically in self-focusing nonlinear media and show that single-charge vortex solitons are unstable in analogous conditions. Subsequently, we study, both theoretically and experimentally, the existence and stability of spatial vortex solitons in two-dimensional hexagonal photonic lattices. We demonstrate that the stability of the double-charge vortices is a consequence of the intersite power exchange in the vortex soliton, and we provide a simple stability criterion on the basis of the analysis of the corresponding discrete nonlinear model. We extend our analysis to the …