The nonlinear optical phenomena described above were chosen to illustrate the great diversity of materials issues which are faced in this rapidly emerging technology area. There is little doubt that a significant further technology advance will require a much more comprehensive understanding of material properties in the context of light-matter interactions. Large nonresonant nonlinear optical response functions are highly desirable in order to achieve efficient fast all-optical switching operations over very short sub-millimeter distances in integrated optical devices. Materials with large nonresonant interactions tend to exhibit very slow responses, of the order of microseconds to milliseconds. Resonant optical nonlinearities provide much stronger interactions but at the expense of energy absorption by the material. Effective dissipation of this energy by non-optical means (thermal etc) proves problematic in general. Other contributors to this proceedings discuss the challenges being faced in understanding the various trade-offs in achieving this end.
Optical breakdown has been a major limitation in utilizing nonresonant self-focusing nonlinearities in the past. Recent experiments and theory support the idea that the LIB threshold increases with decreasing optical pulse duration although there appears to have been no systematic study of this issue in the femtosecond optical pulse regime. The possibility then exists of being able to utilize very low energy but intense light bullets as ultrafast information carriers or switches.
The work reported on here has been carried out in collaboration with many colleagues at or associated with, the Arizona Center for Mathematical Sciences (ACMS). In particular, the contributions of the following are acknowledged: Robert Indik, Cun Zheng Ning, Quanyuan Feng, Scott Glasgow, Randy Flesch, Michal Mlejnek, Ewan Wright (Optical Sciences Center), Rolf Binder (Optical Sciences Center), Stephan Koch (Phillips Universität Marburg), Weng Chow (Sandia Labs.) and John McInerney (University College Cork). Major support for this work has been provided by the U.S. Air Force under contract numbers AFOSR-94-1-0144DEF, AFOSR-94-1-0051 and AFOSR-94-1-0463. Part of the work was carried out under a international U.S. - European collaboration funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF: ANT9404732) and JVM acknowledges local support from the Office of the President, University College Cork.