Abstract

Recent progress in ultrafast technology has led to the generation of optical pulses as short as 8 fs. The propagation of such short pulses in nonlinear optical media requires new computational techniques in which the standard approximations such as the slowly-varying envelope approximation (SVEA) and rotating-wave approximation (RWA) are not made while using the Maxwell-Bloch equations [1]. Previous calculations, which used the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method, found that for a a Kerr-like instantaneous nonlinearity [2] significant differences can occur when the full vector Maxwell equations are used instead of the nonlinear Schrodinger equation. Recently, the FDTD method has been extended to the case of a homogeneously broadened two-level atomic system [3].

© 1996 Optical Society of America