Abstract

Few years ago the experimental observation of the envelope shock waves for the ultrashort light pulses in capillary fibers filled by transparent neat organic liquids was reported.¹ The conditions needed for electromagnetic shock wave formation are very crude. In contrast to optical soliton, the shock wave for the light pulse is stable not only when the balance between dispersion and nonlinearity in a medium was reached, but the inertial nonlinear response was important also. As it is known, the shock wave for the light pulse might be described by the set of differential equations, which are identical to the ones for self-focusing effect, if the one spatial coordinate in these equations is changed by the temporal one. Similar to optical soliton, the shock wave regime realizes the effective self-compression of the light pulses in temporal scale. A great amount of the energy of initial laser pulse might be accumulated in a shock peak at the leading front of the pulse, whereas the main portion of light energy during the high-order soliton compression is transformed into the coherent background and represented the optical loss channel for the light pulse compression in a temporal scale.

© 1994 IEEE