Necklace Beam Generation in Nonlinear Colloidal Engineered Media

Modulational instability is a phenomenon that reveals itself as the exponential growth of weak perturbations in the presence of an intense pump beam propagating in a nonlinear medium. It plays a key role in such nonlinear optical processes as supercontinuum generation, light filamentation, and rogue waves. However, practical realization of these phenomena in the majority of available nonlinear media still relies on high-intensity optical beams. Here, we analytically and numerically show the possibility of necklace beam generation originating from low-intensity spatial modulational instability of vortex beams in engineered soft-matter nonlinear media.