Spectral tunneling of lattice nonlocal solitons

We address spectral tunneling of walking spatial solitons in photorefractive media with nonlocal diffusion component of the nonlinear response and an imprinted shallow optical lattice. In contrast to materials with local nonlinearities, where solitons traveling across the lattice close to the Bragg angle suffer large radiative losses, in photorefractive media with diffusion nonlinearity resulting in self-bending, solitons survive when their propagation angle approaches and even exceeds the Bragg angle. In the spatial frequency domain this effect can be considered as tunneling through the band of spatial frequencies centered around the Bragg frequency where the spatial group velocity dispersion is positive. ©2010 The American Physical Society