Generation of surface soliton arrays

We discover that at the edge of optical lattice imprinted in saturable nonlinear media one-dimensional surface solitons exist only within a band of light intensities, and that they cease to exist when the lattice depth exceeds an upper threshold. We also reveal the generation of arrays of two-dimensional surface solitons mediated by transverse modulational instability of one-dimensional solitons, a process that is found to exhibit specific features associated to properties of the optical lattice.