Abstract
Two optical beams, copropagating in a Kerr medium, interact with each other through cross-phase modulation. Such nonlinear beam coupling leads to a transverse modulation instability that is evident as spatial modulation of the beam profiles. A linear-stability analysis in the plane-wave approximation predicts the range of spatial frequencies over which modulation can occur. The case of self-defocusing media is particularly interesting, since modulation instability occurs only when both beams are present simultaneously. Numerical simulations are used to study how modulation instability can occur for finite-size beams. In particular, the mutual coupling of two copropagating Gaussian beams is studied in detail.
© 1990 Optical Society of America
Full Article | PDF ArticleMore Like This
Xiaoyu Dai, Yuanjiang Xiang, Shuangchun Wen, and Dianyuan Fan
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 26(4) 564-571 (2009)
A. D. Boardman, P. Bontemps, and K. Xie
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 14(11) 3119-3126 (1997)
A. A. Canabarro, B. Santos, Iram Gleria, M. L. Lyra, and A. S. B. Sombra
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 27(9) 1878-1885 (2010)