GUIDANCE PROPERTIES OF NONLINEAR PLANAR WAVE-GUIDES

We discuss the propagation of electromagnetic waves through a stratified dielectric. The ability of such a device to support guided waves depends upon the way in which the refractive index varies across the layers. In the present discussion, we show how nonlinear effects and appropriate stratification can be used to obtain any one of the following behaviours: (i) guidance occurs only at low power, (ii) guidance occurs only at high power, (iii) guidance occurs at all powers, (iv) there is no guidance. The situation (i) is obtained by using materials with a defocusing dielectric response, whereas the situation (ii) is obtained for suitable configurations of self-focusing materials. The situations (iii) and (iv) can be obtained by using either defocusing or self-focusing materials. By seeking solutions of a particular form, we reduce the problem to the study of solutions in the Sobolev space H-1(R) of a second-order differential equation. The discussion of defocusing nonlinearities is based in the study of the global behaviour of the branch of solutions bifurcating from a simple eigenvalue. For self-focusing nonlinearities we use a variational approach.