Nonlinear Effects in Photonic Materials - Abstract

Yulin, Alexey

Optical solitons in the media with internal resonances

Propagation of short pulses in the media with non-instantaneous resonant polarization response is discussed in the work. The example of such media is the system with inclusions of metallic nanostructures into a dielectruc host. At certain frequencies the linear and nonlinear properties of such systems are strongly affected by the surface plasmon resonances of the metallic inclusions. Modern technology allows engineering of the properties of the media by appropriate design of the metallic nanoparticles. To describe the propagation of short pulses in the system in question the differential equation for the polarization must be retained and so the light dynamics is described by the coupled equations for the electromagnetic field and for the polarization. We derived slow varying amplitude description of the system. Within this approach it is shown that optical solitons can form from the short pulses launched in the media. These solitons in some sense can be treated as an analogy to self-induced transparency solitons when the front part of the pulse excites the medium and the rear part of the soliton removes the excitation of the polarization. The effect of dissipation on the solitons is also discussed. It is demonstrated that the dissipation can lead either to acceleration or to deceleration of the solitons. We also consider the interactions of the solitons with quasilinear waves. It is shown that there may be Cherenkov radiation of the dispersive waves by the solitons and the frequency generation resulting from the resonant scattering of the radiation on the solitons.