Few-Optical-Cycle Solitons and Pulse Self-Compression in a Kerr Medium

Abstract

In a transparent medium with instantaneous Kerr nonlinearity we find a new class of few-optical-cycle solitons and prove them to be the fundamental structures in pulse propagation dynamics. We demonstrate numerically that in the asymptotic stage of pulse propagation the input pulse splits into isolated few-cycle solitons where the quantity and their parameters are determined by the initial pulse. We generalize the concept of the high-order Schrödinger solitons to the few-cycle regime and show how it can be used for efficient pulse compression down to the single cycle duration.