Abstract

Beams propagating in nonlinear media can be either stable (for example solitons) or experience instabilities and chaos, depending on the response of the medium, its dimensionality, and the excitation conditions. I lis well known, for example, that one-dimensional solitons in Kerr media are very robust, but they are unstable in geometries with two transverse dimensions.¹ Another example are plane waves that arc unstable in geometries with one or two transverse dimensions in Kerr-type media, periodically breaking up in time and/or space into multiple beams, a phenomenon known as modulational instability (MI).

© 1997 Optical Society of America