Eliminating the transverse instabilities of Kerr solitons

Summary form only given. Despite the progress in the field of optical spatial solitons, transverse instability (TI) has remained a problem. For a spatial optical (1+1)D soliton that is self-trapped in one dimension, x, is uniform in the transverse dimension, y, and is propagating along z, TI causes the soliton to break up along y into an array of 2D filaments. Here we show that if the soliton is made sufficiently incoherent in its transverse uniform dimension, y. then TI is completely eliminated.