Generation of surface soliton arrays.

We discover that, at the edge of an optical lattice imprinted in a saturable nonlinear medium, one-dimensional surface solitons exist only within a band of light intensities and that they cease to exist when the lattice depth exceeds an upper threshold. We also reveal the generation of arrays of two-dimensional surface solitons mediated by the transverse modulational instability of one-dimensional solitons, a process that is found to exhibit specific features associated to properties of the optical lattice.