Abstract

Starting from a general point of view, in this paper we have investigated the effects on the TE propagation in a slab optical waveguide with a nonlinear bounding medium due to the existence of a saturable nonlinearity. First, we have shown that the stationary waveguiding properties of such nonlinear waves can be completely described in a very compact way by means of the usual normalized effective modal index (b)and a set of five independent normalized parameters: the well-known normalized thickness (V) and asymmetry measure (a) of the waveguide, the generalized aspect ratio between film and substrate refractive indices (δ_n), a guided power measure (e_s) and a normalized saturation value of the substrate refractive index (γ). The value γ = 0 renders to the linear or low-power limit,^[1] whereas the ideal Kerr-like nonlinearity^[2] correspond to the limiting case γ→∞.

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