[工学]麻省理工大学 超高速光学系统 课程课件chapter3.pdfVIP

Chapter 3 Nonlinear Pulse Propagation There are many nonlinear pulse propagation problems worthwhile of being considered in detail, such as pulse propagation through a two-level medium in the coherent regime, which leads to self-induced transparency and solitons governed by the Sinus-Gordon-Equation. The basic model for the medium is the two-level atom discussed before with infinitely long relaxation times T1,2 , i.e. assuming that the pulses are much shorter than the dephasing time in the medium. In such a medium pulses exist, where the first half of the pulse fully inverts the medium and the second half of the pulse extracts the energy from the medium. The integral over the Rabi-frequency as defined in Eq.(2.39) is than a mutiple of 2π. The interested reader is refered to the book of Allen and Eberly [1]. Here, we are interested in the nonlinear dynamics due to the Kerr-effect which is most important for understanding pulse propagation problems in optical communications and short pulse generation. 3.1 The Optical Kerr-effect In an isotropic and homogeneous medium, the refractive index can not de- pend on the direction of the electric field. Therefore, to lowest order, the refractive index of such a medium can only depend quadratically on the field, i.e. on the intensity [22] n= n(ω,|A|2 2 ) ≈n (ω) + n |A| . (3.1) 0 2,L Here, we assume, that the pulse envelope A is normalized such that |A|2 is the intensity of the pulse. This is the optical Kerr effect and n2,L is called 63 64 CHAPTER 3. NONLINEAR PULSE PROPAGATION 2 Material Refractive index n n [cm /W]