Nonlinear Propagation of Optical Pulses and Beams
Doctoral thesis, 1994

The propagation of optical beams and pulses under the influence of nonlinear effects is characterized by a rich variety of phenomena and many potentially important applications. We analyse two main topics in this context: nonlinear beam propagation, and nonlinear pulse propagation in optical fibers. The propagation of an optical beam is characterized by diffractive broadening. For Kerr-media, in which the refractive index increases with beam intensity, at a certain intensity, the beam may induce its own waveguide and propagate without broadening. For higher intensities, the nonlinearly induced refractive index causes self-focusing and in some cases even collapsing singularities. We demonstrate in this work that an analytical variational approach describes the dynamics of nonlinear beam propagation very well, in particular with respect to the phase modulation dynamics, which previous approaches are found to describe erroneously. The collapse can be removed by allowing the refractive index to saturate. Beam dynamics in saturable nonlinear media is therefore an important issue. Using the variational method, we manage to reproduce the essential features from numerical simulations, and to give a complete picture of optical beam dynamics in saturable nonlinear media. Another important effect in nolinear media is the modulational instability, which is well-known to break up broad beams into filaments. However, this instability can occur only in nonlinear focusing media. Considering a pulsed beam with a defocusing-in-time and focusing-in-space nonlinearity, we show that temporal breakup is possible due to the spatial instability, despite the fact that a purely temporal modulation is stable.

self-phase modulation

optical wave breaking

paraxial-ray approximation

stimulated Raman scattering

nonlinear Schrödinger equation

optical collapse

modulational instability

higher-order dispersion

optical fibers

saturable nonlinearity

Kerr-nonlinearity

self-trapping

group-velocity dispersion

optical solitons

self-focusing

Author

Magnus Karlsson

Department of Electromagnetic Field Theory

Subject Categories

Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering

ISBN

91-7197-028-2

Technical report - School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg, Sweden: 262

Doktorsavhandlingar vid Chalmers tekniska högskola. Ny serie: 1051

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Created

10/7/2017