Optical kinks and kink-kink and kink-pulse interactions in resonant two-level media

Abstract

An optical kink is a shock-wave-like field structure which can appear in a resonant two-level medium as a result of the nonlinear process of self-steepening. We numerically simulate this process using an adiabatically switching waveform as an input and confirm the self-similarity of resulting kinks. The analysis is also applicable to a more general waveform with a decaying trailing edge which we call a kinklike pulse. We study in detail collisions of kinks with other kinks and ultrashort pulses and demonstrate the possibility to control kink speed by changing the parameters of counterpropagating fields. The effects considered can be treated as belonging to a wide class of unexplored phenomena in the regime of incoherent light-matter interaction.

Controlling wave fronts with tunable disordered non-Hermitian multilayers

“…It is known that the adiabatically switching waveform (Eq. 4 ) undergoes self-steepening resulting in the kink (shock wave) formation after some distance passed through the resonantly absorbing medium 61 63 . Such a kink is seen in Fig.…”

Tunable virtual gain in resonantly absorbing media

“…The further advances include studies of the ever more shorter -few-cycle [48][49][50], subcycle [51], and unipolar [52] -pulses as well as interactions between pulses in resonant media [53,54] resulting in such phenomena as population gratings [55] and diode-like effect [56], among others. On the other hand, the incoherent waveforms with longer characteristic timescales such as incoherent solitons [57] and optical kinks [58,59] can also withstand absorption in resonant media. We also mention the studies of ultrashort pulses [60] and wavefront propagation [61] in disordered resonantly absorbing and amplifying media.…”