The angular dependence of the hyper-Rayleigh scattered light intensity from a suspension of bacteriorhodopsin has been analyzed. The observation calls for combination of the second-order nonlinear hyperpolarizability of the retinal chromophore with the linear refractive index of the apo-protein matrix. The structuring of the small nonlinear chromophore in the large linear matrix imparts propert...

We analyze theoretically and generate experimentally two-dimensional nonlinear lattices with periodic phase modulation in a photorefractive medium. The light-induced periodically modulated nonlinear refractive index is highly anisotropic and nonlocal, and it depends on the lattice orientation relative to the crystal axis. We discuss the stability of such induced photonic structures and their gu...

We predict a sharp crossover from nonlinear self-defocusing to discrete self-trapping of a narrow Gaussian beam with the increase of the refractive index contrast in a periodic photonic lattice. We demonstrate experimentally nonlinear discrete localization of light with defocusing nonlinearity by single site excitation in LiNbO(3) waveguide arrays.

We report the discovery of temporal and spectral self-shifts of dark optical solitons propagating in single-mode fibers. These shifts become increasingly pronounced as the intensity and the fiber length are increased. We show that our data are in quantitative agreement with numerical solutions to a modified nonlinear Schrödinger equation that includes the Raman contribution to the nonlinear ref...

The formalism of coupled-mode theory is adopted for describing nonlinear pulse propagation in optical fibers, the coupling being induced by the nonlinear part of the refractive index. This approach describes in a natural way the influence of the waveguide, and in principle allows of the possibility of investigating soliton propagation when more than one mode is excited.

It is experimentally shown that using organic materials of high nonlinear refractive index dissolved in a saturable-absorber solution permits femtosecond-pulse compression in a simple colliding-pulse mode-locked laser employing cavity-mirror dispersion adjustment.

The standard scalar paraxial parabolic (Fock–Leontovich) propagation equation is generalized to include allorder nonparaxial corrections in the significant case of a tensorial refractive-index perturbation on a homogeneous isotropic background. In the resultant equation, each higher-order nonparaxial term (associated with diffraction in homogeneous space and scaling as the ratio between beam wa...