The excitation of near-infrared (2+1)D solitons in liquid carbon disulfide is demonstrated due to the simultaneous contribution of the third- and fifth-order susceptibilities. Solitons propagating free from diffraction for more than 10 Rayleigh lengths although damped, were observed to support the proposed soliton behavior. Numerical calculations using a nonlinear Schr\"odinger-type equation were also performed.

Various techniques to characterize the nonlinear (NL) optical response of centro-symmetric materials are presented and evaluated with emphasis on the relationship between the macroscopic measurable quantities and the microscopic properties of photonic materials. NL refraction and NL absorption of the materials are the phenomena of major interest. The dependence of the NL refraction and NL absorption coefficients on the nature of the materials was studied as well as on the laser excitation characteristics of wavelength, intensity, spatial profile, pulse duration and pulses repetition rate. Selected experimental results are discussed and illustrated. The various techniques currently available were compared and their relative advantages and drawbacks were evaluated. Critical comparisons among established techniques provided elements to evaluate their accuracies and sensitivities with respect to novel methods that present improvements with respect to the conventional techniques.

Optics InfoBase is the Optical Society's online library for flagship journals, partnered and copublished journals, and recent proceedings from OSA conferences.

We report a one-laser-shot measurement technique using a phase object at the entry of a $4f$ coherent imaging system to characterize the value of the nonlinear refractive index of materials placed in the Fourier plane of the setup. Experimental and simulated images are presented here in order to validate our approach. We show that the use of a quarter-wavelength dephasing object maximizes the transmission variations in the detected image. We show also that the use of phase objects increases significantly the sensitivity of the measurement compared to top-hat beams (by a factor of 6). Moreover, by adding this type of object at the entry of our imaging system it is possible to determine the sign of the refractive nonlinearity.