Stabilization of light bullets in nonlinear metamaterial waveguides

TL;DR

This paper theoretically investigates the conditions for stable propagation of three-dimensional light bullets in nonlinear metamaterial waveguides, highlighting the roles of dispersion and nonlinearities in different index regimes.

Contribution

It introduces a combined variational and numerical approach to identify stability conditions for light bullets in negative and positive index metamaterials with cubic and quintic nonlinearities.

Findings

Stable light bullets can propagate in negative index regimes with specific nonlinear balances.

In positive index regimes, stable propagation occurs with different nonlinear dispersion conditions.

Collision dynamics show solitons maintain shape post-collision, indicating solitonic behavior.

Abstract

In this paper, we carry out a theoretical investigation on the propagation of spatio-temporal solitons (light bullets) in the nonlinear metamaterial waveguides. Our theoretical study is based on the formulation of Lagrangian variational analysis with a suitable ansatz followed by a split-step Fourier method in confirming the outcomes former numerically. A particular emphasis is given to obtain the conditions on the system parameters for stable dynamics in negative as well as positive index regimes of metamaterial waveguides. Similar to the conventional medium, the three-dimensional (3D) light bullets are highly unstable in metamaterials with the Kerr type nonlinearity alone. However, in the negative index regime of metamaterials, stable propagation of light bullets may occur in the normal dispersion regime balancing with defocusing cubic nonlinearity and focusing quintic nonlinearity. As in the conventional case, the stable dynamics is also observed in the case of anomalous dispersion with focusing cubic nonlinearity and defocusing quintic nonlinearity in the positive index regime. To test the solitonic nature of the 3D light bullets in the metamaterials, we also numerically investigate the collision dynamics of two light bullets. The study shows that the spatio-temporal soliton propagates without any change except perhaps some phase shift after a collision with another spatio-temporal soliton in competing cubic and quintic nonlinear metamaterials. The improper balancing between the linear and nonlinear effects results to form the bullet molecules in a distorted form with a large amount of energy after interaction and in the long run, oscillations of the light bullets grow and the bullets become filaments. We have observed the same collision dynamics in both the negative and positive refractive index regimes of the metamaterial.