No abstract

Pulse propagation in nonlinear waveguides is most frequently modeled by resorting to the generalized nonlinear Schrödinger equation (GNLSE). In recent times, exciting new materials with peculiar nonlinear properties, such as negative nonlinear coefficients and a zero-nonlinearity wavelength, have been demonstrated. Unfortunately, the GNLSE may lead to unphysical results in these cases since, in general, it does not preserve the number of photons and, in the presence of a negative nonlinearity, predicts a blue shift due to Raman scattering. In this paper, we put forth a modified GNLSE that can be used to model the propagation in media with an arbitrary, even negative, nonlinear coefficient. This novel photon-conserving GNLSE (pcGNLSE) ensures preservation of the photon number and can be solved by the same tried and trusted numerical algorithms used for the standard GNLSE. Finally, we compare results for soliton dynamics in fibers with different nonlinear coefficients obtained with the pcGNLSE and the GNLSE.

We exploit the anisotropic plasmonic behavior of gold nanorods (AuNRs) to obtain a waveguide with a nonlinear coefficient dependent on both the frequency and polarization of incident light. The optical properties of the waveguide are described by an extension of the Maxwell Garnett model to nonlinear optics and anisotropic nanoparticles. Then, we perform a study of modulation instability (MI) in this system by resorting to the recently introduced photon-conserving nonlinear Schrödinger equation (pcNLSE), as the pcNLSE allows us to model propagation in nonlinear waveguides of arbitrary sign and frequency dependence of the nonlinear coefficient. Results show that the anisotropy of the nanorods leads to two well-differentiated MI regimes, a feature that may find applications in all-optical devices.