Creating Light-Made Waveguides with Structured Optical Beams in Nonlinear Kerr Media

While in linear optics the subject of structured light has been a fruitful field of both theoretical and applied research, its development in the arena of nonlinear optics has been underexplored. In this paper, we construct Frozen-Wave-type structured optical beams in Kerr nonlinear media, emphasizing the self-defocusing case, and use them to guide and control Gaussian optical beams. The results presented in this study support the expectation that structured light in nonlinear media can open new venues of theoretical research and applications, particularly in the realms of light controlling light and for all-optical photonics.