Generation and weak beam control of two-dimensional multicolored arrays in a quadratic nonlinear medium

We report on the first experimental observation of 2D multicolored transverse arrays in a quadratic nonlinear medium under the pump of two crossly overlapped femtosecond beams. The 2D reproducible patterns are caused by cascaded noncollinear quadratic nonlinear couplings between the input pulses and quadratic spatial solitons originated from spatial breakup of one of the input beams with spatial ellipticity. A seed supercontinuum pulse is then diffracted and amplified with phase preservation, resulting in the formation of up-converted multicolor 2D transverse arrays. By seeding with weak second harmonic pulses, the 2D multicolored transverse patterns are suppressed due to weak beam control of the induced quadratic spatial solitons.