Wave breaking and formation of dispersive shock waves in a defocusing nonlinear optical material

Abstract

We theoretically describe the quasi one-dimensional transverse spreading of a light pulse propagating in a nonlinear optical material in the presence of a uniform background light intensity. For short propagation distances the pulse can be described within a nondispersive approximation by means of Riemann's approach. For larger distances, wave breaking occurs, leading to the formation of dispersive shocks at both ends of the pulse. We describe this phenomenon within Whitham modulation theory, which yields an excellent agreement with numerical simulations. Our analytic approach makes it possible to extract the leading asymptotic behavior of the parameters of the shock.

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Cited by in corpus (15)

• Quantitative Analysis of Shock Wave Dynamics in a Fluid of Light
• Riemann problem for the light pulses in optical fibers for the generalized Chen-Lee-Liu equation
• Blast waves in a paraxial fluid of light
• Evolution of wave pulses in fully nonlinear shallow-water theory
• Dissipation-enhanced collapse singularity of a nonlocal fluid of light in a hot atomic vapor
• Formation of dispersive shock waves in evolution of a two-temperature collisionless plasma
• Spin-orbit-coupled fluids of light in bulk nonlinear media
• Formation of dispersive shock waves in a saturable nonlinear medium
• Accessing and Manipulating Dispersive Shock Waves in a Nonlinear and Nonlocal Rydberg Medium
• Dispersionless evolution of inviscid nonlinear pulses
• Emptiness Formation in Polytropic Quantum Liquids
• Static and dynamic properties of self-bound droplets of light in hot vapours
• Shock wave generation and propagation in dissipative and nonlocal nonlinear Rydberg media
• Short-distance propagation of nonlinear optical pulses
• Dispersionless Limits of Some Integrable Equations