Nonlinear dynamics of optical absorption of intense beams

Abstract

On traversing materials with absorbing dyes, weak optical beams decay exponentially (a Beer profile), while intense beams develop in time a profile that is spatially linear until at great depth it becomes spatially exponential. This anomalous, deep penetration, due to photobleaching of surface layers, is important for heavy dye loading and intense beams, for instance in photo-actuation. We address the problem of the evolution in time from initial Beer's Law to a finally deeply-penetrating optical profile in dyes. Our largely analytic solution of the coupled, nonlinear, partial differential equations governing the spatiotemporal decay of the Poynting flux and the nonlinear population dynamics of the photo-active molecules under intense irradiation has application to optomechanical devices.