Photonic Nambu-Goldstone bosons

We study numerically the spatial dynamics of light in periodic square lattices in the presence of a Kerr term, emphasizing the peculiarities stemming from the nonlinearity. We find that, under rather general circumstances, the phase pattern of the stable ground state depends on the character of the nonlinearity: the phase is spatially uniform if it is defocusing whereas in the focusing case, it presents a chess board pattern, with a difference of $\pi$ between neighboring sites. We show that the lowest lying perturbative excitations can be described as perturbations of the phase and that finite-sized structures can act as tunable metawaveguides for them. The tuning is made by varying the in…