Abstract

As is well known, the stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) in nonlinear optical fibers precludes the existence of stable solitary waves both of bright and dark soliton types. For bright solitons, the SRS effect can affect the temporal evolution even for pulses as wide as a few picoseconds causing a continuous frequency down shift^1,2. For dark solitons, the SRS effect leads to a soliton acceleration with a subsequent decay^3,4. However, new regimes of nonlinear wave dynamics may be expected to exist in the presence of the SRS effect, e.g., propagation of shock waves or kinks^3,5. The nonlinear wave in the form of a kink may be treated as a particular case of a shock corresponding to a jump between two uniform background waves having different amplitudes of the envelopes. As a matter of fact, such a type of nonlinear waves is known in plasma physics as a double layer^6,7.

© 1993 Optical Society of America