Nonlinear Optical Interactions at Surfaces and Interfaces

Abstract

Our discussions so far have assumed that the nonlinear couplings responsible for the phenomena explored take place in bulk matter. Of course, the presence of bounding surfaces played a central role in the discussion of solitons in optical fibers presented in Chap. 7. But the role of the surface there is to guide the electromagnetic disturbance, and to confine its fields to a finite region of space. The nonlinearity responsible for soliton formation, as described in (7.2,3), is that characteristic of the bulk material from which the optical waveguide is fabricated.