Spatiotemporal dynamics of modulation instability in Kerr nonlinear media with pure-quartic dispersion

Abstract

We present the analytical and numerical analysis on spatiotemporal dynamics of modulation instability (MI) in Kerr nonlinear media with pure-quartic dispersion. We apply a linear stability method to arrive at a universal expression for pure-quartic instability gain, which can simultaneously describe the temporal, spatial, and spatiotemporal cases. The results show that the condition of such three fundamental instability occurrence in pure-quartic dispersion media (PDM) is the same as that in conventional quadratic dispersion media (QDM). Another interesting observation is that the maximum gain is also the same in both cases. For temporal instability, there exists a critical power below which the instability bandwidth becomes wider than the corresponding case in QDM or otherwise. For spatiotemporal instability, the instability region depending on critical frequencies is found to show some remarkable difference when compared with the latter case. The analytical prediction resulting from linear stability analysis is confirmed by the numerical method.