Necklace beam generation in nonlinear colloidal engineered media and negative index metamaterials

Abstract

Modulational instability is a phenomenon that reveals itself as the exponential growth of weak perturbations in the presence of an intense pump beam propagating in a nonlinear medium. It plays a key role in such nonlinear optical processes as supercontinuum generation, light filamentation, rogue waves, and ring (or necklace) beam formation. To date, a majority of studies of these phenomena have focused on light-matter interactions in selffocusing Kerr media existing in nature. However, a large and tunable nonlinear response of a colloidal suspension can be tailored at will by judiciously engineering the optical polarizability. Here, we analytically and numerically show the possibility of necklace beam generation originating from spatial modulational instability of vortex beams in engineered soft-matter nonlinear media with different types of exponential nonlinearity. One of the most fundamental properties of isotropic negative-index metamaterials, namely opposite directionality of the Poynting vector and the wavevector, enable many novel linear and nonlinear regimes of light-matter interactions. In the second part of this talk, we predict distinct characteristics of azimuthal modulation instability of optical vortices with different topological charges in negative-index metamaterials with Kerr-type and saturable nonlinearity. We derive an analytical expression for the spatial modulation-instability gain for the Kerr-nonlinearity case and show that a specific condition relating the diffraction and the nonlinear lengths must be fulfilled for the azimuthal modulation instability to occur. Finally, we investigate the rotation of the necklace beams due to the transfer of orbital angular momentum of the generating vortex on the movement of solitary necklace beams. We show that the direction of rotation is opposite in positive- and negative-index materials.