Stabilization of optical pulse propagation by a supporting periodic structure

Results of systematic numerical simulations of the interaction between a lo w-intensity solitary signal pulse belonging to an anomalous-dispersion chan nel in a nonlinear optical fiber and a simple Periodic Support Structure (P SS) launched by a sinusoidal beating signal in the mate channel, that may h ave either anomalous or normal dispersion, are reported. If the PSS is gene rated in the normal-dispersion channel, the purely sinusoidal form of PSS-g enerating input is sufficient to stabilize the signal pulse, provided that the powers of the signal pulse and PSS belong to specially selected interva ls. if the PSS is launched in the anomalous-dispersion wavelength region, w e find that the purely sinusoidal PSS shape cannot stabilize the pulse, and it quickly decays into radiation. However, mixing the strong sinusoidal in put with additional small-amplitude harmonics provides for a nearly stable propagation of the pulse over distances greater than or equal to 50 pulse d ispersion lengths. A drastic difference between the cases of the normal-dis persion and anomalous-dispersion PSS is that, in the former case, the signa l pulse with a too small intensity is unstable, while in the latter case th e pulse is an essentially linear one and the increase of its intensity only deteriorates the stability. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. AV rights reser ved.