Abstract

When vacuum fluctuations at the Stokes frequency are amplified through the interaction of a coherent pump with a Raman medium, large phase shifts in the Stokes field may survive well into its macroscopic regime. Because the response time of the medium’s polarizability is finite, the relative phase of the polarizability and the Stokes field exhibits a peak, called a phase wave. Correspondingly, the pump reacts to a sufficiently large phase shift by briefly repleting before continuing its depletion, thus forming a solitary wave or soliton. It is possible to use the statistical properties of phase waves to predict such observables as the frequency of soliton production, the distribution of soliton amplitudes, and the soliton delay-time statistics.

© 1988 Optical Society of America