Giant Goos-Hänchen shifts and radiation-induced trapping of Helmholtz solitons at nonlinear interfaces

Addressable Refraction and Curved Soliton Waveguides Using Electric Interfaces

A great deal of interest over the years has been directed to the optical space solitons for the possibility of realizing 3D waveguides with very low propagation losses. A great limitation in their use for writing complex circuits is represented by the impossibility of making curved structures. In the past, solitons in nematic liquid crystals, called nematicons, were reflected on electrical interfaces, and more recently photorefractive spatial solitons have been, as well. In the present work, we investigate refraction and total reflection of spatial solitons with saturable electro-optic nonlinearity, such as the photorefractive ones, on an electric wall acting as a reflector. Using a custom FDTD code, the propagation of a self-confined beam was analyzed as a function of the applied electric bias. The electrical reflector was simulated by applying different biases in two adjacent volumes. We observed both smaller and larger angles of refraction, up to the critical π/2-refraction condition, and then the total reflection. The radii of curvature of the associated guides can be varied from centimeters down to hundreds of microns. The straight guides showed losses as low as 0.07 dB/cm as previously observed, while the losses associated with single curves were estimated to be as low as 0.2 dB.

Widely varying giant Goos-Hänchen shifts from Airy beams at nonlinear interfaces

We present a numerical study of the giant Goos-Hänchen shifts (GHSs) obtained from an Airy beam impinging on a nonlinear interface. To avoid any angular restriction associated with the paraxial approximation, the analysis is based on the nonlinear Helmholtz equation. We report the existence of nonstandard nonlinear GHSs displaying an extreme sensitivity to the input intensity and the existence of multiple critical values. These intermittent and oscillatory regimes can be explained in terms of competition between critical coupling to a surface mode and soliton emission from the refracted beam component and how this interplay varies with localization of the initial Airy beam.