Propagation of electric field of the few-cycle femtosecond pulse in nonlinear Kerr medium

Abstract

In this paper, the propagation of a few-cycle femtosecond pulse in a nonlinear Kerr medium is studied by the method of time-transformation. The time-transformation approach can greatly improve the computational efficiency. Because the width of electric field of the few-cycle femtosecond pulse is less than the characteristic time of Raman response in a nonlinear medium, it is observed that the electric field of the pulse experiences a significant deformation and breaks into a Raman soliton and the dispersion waves during the propagation, which can be attributed to strongly nonlocal nonlinearity. A deeper investigation of the time-frequency distributions for both the Raman soliton and the dispersion waves is also included. Since the pulse contains only few cycles, the carrier-envelope phase (CEP) of the pulse plays an important role in the process of nonlinear propagation. The numerical results show the CEP-dependence in the process of nonlinear propagation: the phase changes for both the Raman soliton and the dispersive waves are just equal to the CEP change of the initial pulse, which indicates that the CEP of the pulse is linearly transmitted in the process of nonlinear propagation. This phenomenon can be attributed to the fact that the phase change due to the nonlinearity is only dependent on the intensities of the fields of both the Raman soliton and the dispersion wave, which are unchanged for all the CEPs.