Abstract

Solid-core photonic crystal fibers (PCFs) are optical fibers with a central silica core surrounded by a regular array of air holes, that provide guidance [1]. Solid-core PCFs have been well explored for nonlinear applications such as frequency conversion through modulational instability and soliton formation leading to supercontinuum generation [2]. However, PCFs can also be designed to have a central additional hole that can be filled with highly nonlinear liquids [3]. In a recent work [4] we have reported that if the central core is filled with liquids with a slow reorientational nonlinearity (such as CS₂ or toluene), the equation describing nonlinear light propagation becomes a linear Schroedinger equation, with a discontinuous potential proportional to the total energy of the pulse and to the response function R(t) itself. This is temporal analogue of the concept of ’accessible solitons’ elaborated in 1997 by Snyder and Mitchell in the case of spatial solitons [5].

© 2011 Optical Society of America