NON-SPECULAR BISTABILITY AT A DELOCALIZED NONLINEAR INTERFACE

Bounded beams reflected at the interface between two dielectric media can undergo lateral displacements, focal shifts, angular deviations, c hanges in the beam waist size and complex amplitude. These effects are examined for beams incident from a linear medium onto a nonlinear def ocusing Kerr-type material, where the nonlinear medium changes are sup posed to be homogeneously non-local. An exact solution to the reflecti on problem is numerically iterated by a sequence of solutions to the r espective linear problems and a rigorous first-order analysis of the n on-specular phenomena is also given. The beam-interface interaction is described in terms of the Wigner distribution function invariant with respect to the nonspecular ABCD transformation. The results show that , for some specified beam parameters, the beam reflection may exhibit bistable switching, which is accompanied by bistable changes in all th e non-specular effects.