Induced soliton ejection from a continuous-wave source waveguided by an optical pulse-soliton train

Abstract

It has been established for some time that high-power pump can trap a probe beam of lower intensity that is simultaneously propagating in a Kerr-type optical medium, inducing a focusing of the probe with the emergence of modes displaying solitonic properties. To understand the mechanism by which such self-sustained modes are generated, and mainly the changes on probe spectrum induced by the cross-phase-modulation effect for an harmonic probe trapped by a multiplex of temporal pulses, a linear equation (for the probe) and a nonlinear Schrödinger equation (for the pump) both coupled by a cross-phase-modulation term, are considered simultaneously. In general the set of coupled probe-pump equations is not exactly tractable at any arbitrary value of the ratio of the cross-phase to the self-phase modulation strengths. However, for certain values of this ratio, the probe modulation wavector develops into $|n,l\textgreater$ {\it quantum states} involving $2n+1$ soliton-shaped eigenfunctions which spectral properties can be characterized unambiguously. Solutions of the probe equation give evidence that the competition between the self-phase and cross-phase modulations leads to a broadband spectrum, with the possibility of a quasi-continuum of soliton modes when the cross-phase-modulation coupling is strong enough.