Modulational Instability of Optical Vortices in Engineered Saturable Media

Abstract

Propagation of light beams in turbid media such as underwater environments, fog, clouds, or biological tissues finds increasingly important applications in science and technology, including bio-imaging, underwater and free-space communication technologies. While many of these applications traditionally relied on conventional, linearly polarized Gaussian beams, light possesses many degrees of freedom that are still largely unexplored, such as spin angular momentum (SAM) and orbital angular momentum (OAM). Here, we present nonlinear light–matter interactions of such complex light beams with “rotational” degrees of freedom in engineered nonlinear colloidal media. By making use of both variational and perturbative approach, we consider non-cylindrical optical vortices, elliptical optical vortices, and higher-order Bessel beams integrated in time (HOBBIT) to predict the dynamics and stability of the evolution of these beams. These results may find applications in many scenarios involving light transmission in strongly scattering environments.