Spatio-temporal pulse propagation in nonlinear dispersive optical media

Abstract

We discuss state-of-art approaches to modeling of propagation of ultrashort optical pulses in one and three spatial dimensions.We operate with the analytic signal formulation for the electric field rather than using the slowly varying envelope approximation, because the latter becomes questionable for few-cycle pulses. Suitable propagation models are naturally derived in terms of unidirectional approximation.