Abstract

The linear optical skin effect is a classic textbook example of how a strongly absorbing material leads to strong evanescent decay and reflection of an optical field incident on an absorbing interface. If the absorber is saturable (i.e. a nonlinear absorber), a sufficiently intense incident pulse can spatially saturate the absorbing medium thereby causing a dynamic shift on wavelength scales of the localized absorbing front. As a result the absorbing front propagates into the medium, separating saturated and unsaturated regions, and acts as a moving mirror from which the pulse is self-reflected.

© 1996 Optical Society of America