Beam interactions in one-dimensional saturable waveguide arrays

The interaction between two parallel beams in one-dimensional discrete saturable systems has been investigated using lithium niobate nonlinear waveguide arrays. When the beams are separated by one channel and in-phase it is possible to observe soliton fusion at low power levels. This new result is confirmed numerically. By increasing the power, soliton-like propagation of weakly-coupled beams occurs. When the beams are out-of-phase the most interesting result is the existence of oscillations which resemble the recently discovered Tamm oscillations.