Anisotropic photonic lattices and discrete solitons in photorefractive media

We study experimentally two-dimensional periodic photonic lattices optically imprinted in photorefractive nonlinear media, and explore the effect of anisotropy on the induced refractive-index patterns. The orientation anisotropy is demonstrated by comparing square and diamond lattices, while the polarization anisotropy is shown to distinguish ordinarily and extraordinarily polarized light. In particular, the extraordinarily polarized lattice induces much stronger refractive-index modulation for the same conditions. Finally, we exploit the photorefractive anisotropy to generate a quasi-one-dimensional refractive-index pattern for the observation of two-dimensional solitons and corroborate these experiments by numerical simulations.