Abstract: Basing on CCD technology and software processing, a new method, namely top- and side-view method, is presented for the observation of spatial optical solitons in photorefractive crystals. When a laser beam is propagating in a crystal, this method has an ability to show the horizontal and vertical outline of the beam at any location of the crystal very intuitively. By use of this method, we have experimentally observed the two-dimension bright photovoltaic solitons in a KNSBN crystal, and the measured results are qualitatively in agreement with the results of numerical simulation.

Keywords: 
• spatiall solitons /
• photorefractive nonlinear optics /
• photovoltaic effect