Observation of multihump multimode self-trapped beams

Summary form only given.We believe we have presented the first observation of multihump multimode self-trapped beams in nature. The multimode soliton is made by two populated modes of its self-induced waveguide. Double- and triple-humped beam profiles are observed corresponding to combinations of the first+second modes and second+third modes, respectively. The observation of multihumped solitons is a result of the fact that the higher modes are sufficiently populated to see the structural features of the higher modes. We observed one-dimensional self-trapped multimode beams in biased photorefractive media for which the explicit form of nonlinearity is well established.