Abstract

Optical nonlinearity is an important property of a material and it characterizes its response to an external electromagnetic field. It is usually accepted that the material response at a certain point depends only on the value of the field at that point. However, the response of many materials is spatially nonlocal. An important class of nonlocal nonlinear media are represented by the thermal nonlinearity [1]. In such media the heat induced by the light absorption is distributed around the source due to thermal diffusion being carried away towards the boundaries of the sample. As a result, the thermal response gives rise to nonlinearity with an infinite degree of nonlocality.

© 2007 IEEE