Dynamics of solitons in nonlinear optical waveguides.

Abstract

In nonlinear optical waveguide structures, injection of an optical beam above a given threshold intensity can be theoretically shown to emit spatial solitons. An all-optical switch based on this phenomenon is designed and computer simulations show that the phenomenon persists despite detrimental effects such as saturation of the nonlinearity and nonlinear absorption. In the cylindrical geometry of an optical fiber, a soliton ring can be emitted from the core and fragment into filaments via a transverse modulational instability. The inclusion of temporal dispersion can destabilize spatially stable solutions, both for normal and anomalous group velocity dispersion. For a saturating nonlinearity, the temporal dispersion can be used to generate trains of nonlinearly self-bound light packets from a continuous sub-emission-treshold input field.