Polarization effects in birefringent Bragg gratings with a Kerr nonlinearity

We show that a Kerr-nonlinear birefringent Bragg grating allows the investigation of three regimes of nonlinear pulse propagation. The regimes are entered by tuning the frequency of the pulse relative to the stop band of the grating. Tuning away from the stop band lowers the intensity necessary for soliton formation but increases the intensity necessary to observe polarization instability. We demonstrate numerically that it should be possible to observe a vector solitary wave in a long grating. We show experimentally that polarization instability is a strong function of the phase lag between the orthogonal polarizations. © 2002 Optical Society of America OCIS codes: 060.4370, 090.0090.