Mcdonald, GS, Syed, KS and Firth, WJ 1992, 'Optical vortices in beam propagation through a self-defocussing medium' , Optics Communications, 94 (5) , pp. 469-476.

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Abstract

We present numerical simulations and analysis of optical vortex propagation in a 3D self-defocussing medium. On plane wave background initial conditions composed of points and lines of phase discontinuity are shown, in some cases, to evolve towards a regular crystal of fully nonlinear vortices. In other cases the solution more resembles a vortex gas. For gaussian beams, we have derived a simple set of ordinary differential equations which are shown to accurately describe the motion of a single vortex while the background beam undergoes significant spreading.

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