Effect of self-steepening on optical solitons in nonlinear media

Abstract

Optical solitons are solitary waves that propagate without deteriorating their special structures as a result of the balance between the group velocity dispersion effect and the nonlinear effect caused by the change in refractive index due to the Kerr effect. Soliton generation and analysis in optics is a pretty popular and modern research topic, as they have a wide range of applications, such as optical communication technology, optical sensing, pulse compression in ultrafast optics and all-optical switching. Particularly, the propagation of optical solitons in fiber optic communication systems is an area of great interest to researchers. Optical solitons can propagate through long distances in fiber transmission systems without being affected by chromatic and polarization mode dispersion. Since their natural structure is preserved, they can be used as natural optical bits of information in fiber optic systems. In nonlinear optics, the propagation of the light pulse in optical fibers can be modeled by the cubic-quintic nonlinear Schrödinger (CQNLS) equation. In fiber optic systems, the width of the optical pulses is reduced to increase the bandwidth and communication speed. Whereas, if the width of the light pulses is very small, that is, the frequency is high, the CQNLS equation may be insufficient to model the physical system. Because, if the light pulse is short, often some higher-order effects need to be taken into account. It can be said that the third-order dispersion, self-steepening (or nonlinear dispersion) and the Raman effect are the most significant higher order effects. In an optical waveguide, the real part of the PT symmetric potential corresponds to the spatial distribution of the refractive index, and the imaginary part corresponds to the balanced gain-loss relationship. NLS equations with higher-order effects can not be solved analytically. Therefore, this equations should be handled with numerical methods. In this thesis, the existence and stability of soliton solutions of some kind of NLS equations that have higher-order effects and the PT symmetric potential were investigated numerically. The pseudospectral renormalization method was used to obtain fundamental soliton solutions. In order to test the nonlinear stability of solitons, spatial evolution simulation of solitons was examined. For this, the split-step Fourier method, which has a very high performance in NLS-type equations, was used. In addition, while examining the dynamic properties of solitons, linear stability conditions were also taken into account. Linear stability analysis of solitons was performed by examining the whole linear stability spectrum of solitons with the help of the Fourier collocation method. The first 4 chapters of this thesis give information about NLS equations, optical solitons, higher-order effects, numerical methods, and stability analysis. In Chapter 5, the existence and dynamic properties of solitons obtained from the NLS equation with the self steepening term are analyzed. In addition, the relationship between PT symmetric periodic potential and the influences of the self-steepening effect is examined. It has been observed that the PT- symmetric periodic potential helps to obtain stable solitons by eliminating adverse effects. In Chapter 6, the soliton solutions of the CQNLS equation with the self steepening term were investigated in the self-focusing cubic, self-defocusing quintic medium. It has been determined that the destabilization effect of self-steepening can be arrested when the coefficient of the cubic nonlinear term is 1 and the coefficient of the quintic nonlinear term is -1. Finally, the conclusions of this thesis are summarized in Chapter 7.