photorefractive spatial-soliton pairs in all three possible realizations: bright–bright, dark–
dark, and dark–bright. We also show that when the total intensity of two coupled solitons is
much lower than the effective dark irradiance, the coupled soliton pair is reduced to
Manakov solitons. In all cases, mutual trapping of both components in the coupled soliton
pair is verified by analyzing, experimentally and numerically, the beam evolution after …