In optical fibers, such solitons may lead to a variety of new techniques for increasing the rate of data communication. The normal tendency of a beam is to spread as it penetrates farther into a material. However, in some types of materials, this tendency to spread is counteracted by a tendency to focus, resulting in a beam of uniform intensity. Spatial solitons are in fact just one type of spatial pattern that can arise in nonlinear optical media. There are a host of other remarkable spontaneous pattern-generating effects giving rise to, for example, patterns of hexagons or squares generated from one single Gaussian optical input beam.
Dynamic holography is another area of research here.
It arises in a particular class of nonlinear optical materials called photorefractives. Photorefractives can holographically store and recall data in real time, and they can also be used either to amplify or to attenuate information-bearing light beams. These circuits are being applied to acoustic and RF signal processing, as well as to new classes of adaptive sensors that can be applied, for example, to robot limbs and to ultrasound detection.