Generation of quasi-steady and steady state photorefractive solitons in an optically active crystal

Spatial solitons in photorefractive (PR) crystals have attracted great interest in the last two decades because they represent a model scheme for solitons in other materials which are more complicated to obtain experimentally. In our presentation, we show that we have succeeded in generating stable self-focused states in an optically active PR crystal (Bi/sub 12/TiO/sub 20/) at 633 nm with a lifetime of several hours.