Guiding and confinement of light induced by optical vortex solitons in a cubic-quintic medium.

The observation of confinement and guiding of light induced by an optical vortex soliton (OVS) in a cubic-quintic (defocusing-focusing) medium is reported. The waveguide effect induced by the bright region of the vortex beam, is mainly due to the defocusing nonlinearity that allows the guiding of a probe beam propagating inside of the OVS dark region. The experimental results are corroborated by numerical simulations based on the cubic-quintic nonlinear Schrödinger equation, showing excellent agreement.