Chirped optical pulse propagation in saturating nonlinear media

Abstract

Using a variational method, we have investigated the propagation characteristics of a chirped optical pulse in anomalously dispersive media possessing saturating nonlinearity. For the special case of uniform loss less media, the dynamics of the temporal width of the pulse is shown to be equivalent to an oscillator of unit mass which is executing its motion under some effective potential well. The potential is examined and four different types of behavior of the pulse width are noticed. The role of saturation parameter and the initial chirp in determining the propagation characteristics have been examined. It is found that, both high value of chirp and saturation are detrimental to stable pulse propagation. Particularly, the effect of chirp becomes severe with the increase in the value of saturation. We have shown that incorporation of saturation in the nonlinearity leads to the existence of bistable soliton. For the case of a lossy medium, net broadening of width takes place over many cycles of oscillation. The net broadening decreases with the increase in the value of saturation.