Geometrical optics in nonlinear media and integrable equations.pdfVIP

a r X i v : n l i n / 0 3 1 2 0 6 9 v 2 [ n l i n .S I ] 5 J a n 2 0 0 4 Geometrical optics in nonlinear media and integrable equations Boris G. Konopelchenko and Antonio Moro Dipartimento di Fisica dell’Universita? di Lecce and INFN, Sezione di Lecce, via Arnesano, I-73100 Lecce, Italy E-mail: konopel@le.infn.it and antonio.moro@le.infn.it Abstract It is shown that the geometrical optics limit of the Maxwell equa- tions for certain nonlinear media with slow variation along one axis and particular dependence of dielectric constant on the frequency and fields gives rise to the dispersionless Veselov-Novikov equation for re- fractive index. It is demonstrated that the last one is amenable to the quasiclassical ??-dressing method. A connection is noted between ge- ometrical optics phenomena under consideration and quasiconformal mappings on the plane. PACS numbers: 02.30.Ik; 42.15.Dp Great variety of nonlinear phenomena from various fields of physics, ap- plied physics, mathematics and applied mathematics can be modeled by non- linear integrable equations [1]-[8]. A subclass of such equations , the so-called dispersionless integrable equations, has attracted a particular interest during the last decade [9]-[17]. In this letter, we will show that the propagation of electromagnetic waves of high frequency in certain nonlinear media is governed by the dispersion- less Veselov-Novikov (dVN) equation. Namely, we will demonstrate that the Maxwell equations describing the propagation of waves in media character- ized by slow variation along the axis z and particular dependence of dielectric constant on frequency and fields in the limit of geometrical optics give rise to the dVN equations for refractive index. These equations provide us with 1 integrable deformations of the plane eikonal equation which preserve, in par- ticular, the total “plane” squared refractive index ∫ ∫ n2dxdy. Under more special conditions one gets the dispersionless Kadomtsev-Petviashvili (dKP)