Bright and dark spatial solitons in metallic nanowire arrays

We investigate the formation and propagation of bright and dark three-dimensional unstaggered spatial solitons with cylindrical symmetry in a nonlinear nanowire metamaterial. The metamaterial is formed by metallic nanowires embedded in a Kerr-type dielectric host and is modeled using an effective medium approach. Unlike conventional Kerr media, the metamaterial supports bright solitons when the host is a self-defocusing material and dark solitons when the host is a self-focusing material. Our numerical calculations show that the confinement of the spatial-solitons results from the interplay of the host nonlinear response strength and the hyperbolic dispersion of the photonic states in the nanowire array. Subwavelength solitary beams may be observed for sufficiently strong nonlinearities.