"Routing of Highly Anisotropic Spatial Solitons and Modulational Instability in liquid crystals", Nature 432, 733-7, Dec. 9 (2004);

The spontaneous spreading of a laser beam can be compensated in complex media through the interplay of optical fluency and material nonlinearity. The resulting non-diffracting beams are denoted spatial solitons, and recently investigated in various bulk media. Nematic liquid crystals have permitted soliton observation at mW powers, the demonstration of soliton-based all-optical logic gates13 and of some fundamental aspects related to light interaction with soft-matter, such as non locality and non-paraxial self-localization.Spatial solitons can be considered light channels, which operate as waveguides by carrying information signals to be spatially steered or switched as they travel inside the filament. However, beyond the limit of a small (fraction of a degree) tilt, significant angular dragging of solitons has never been demonstrated, secluding various applications to the conceptual domain. Among them we mention readdrassable interconnects, optical tweezers, light scanners and novel surgical techniques. In this Paper, we present an experimental and theoretical investigation, of voltage-controlled walk-off and steering of self-localized light in nematic liquid crystals, reporting the first experimental evidence of angular dragging over several degrees of individual spatial solitons as well as arrays of filaments generated by way of modulational instability.