Bragg-induced oscillations in non-PT complex photonic lattices

Abstract

We investigate Bragg-induced oscillations in complex non-PT periodic structures, that is, a periodic medium with gain and loss and not necessarily symmetric under the combined action of parity and time reversal operations. We compare our analytic results based on the expansion of the optical field in Bragg-resonant plane waves with a direct numerical integration of the paraxial wave equation beyond the shallow potential approximation and using a wide Gaussian beam as initial condition. In particular, we study under which conditions a mode trapping phenomenon may still be observed and to inspect how the energy exchange between the spectral modes takes place during propagation in this more general class of asymmetric complex potentials.