Abstract

After the early proposal of self-trapped optical beams [1] only some years ago the interest in spatial solitons as building blocks for all-optical devices has increased [2], [3], [4]. Because of the lack of materials with large electronic non-resonant third-order susceptibilities the following problem for the application of fast χ⁽³⁾ processes arises: the product of the required light intensity and the interaction length becomes large. In order to relax this requirement, recently the use of a new cascaded second-order nonlinear refraction has been proposed to support the direct third-order nonlinear refraction [5], [6]. It was theoretically shown that important χ⁽³⁾ effects like temporal soliton propagation, nonlinear switching, and soliton switching will work on the basis of the cascaded χ⁽²⁾: χ⁽²⁾ nonlinearity with reduced light intensities.

© 1993 Optical Society of America