Paper detail

Engineering soliton nonlinearities: From local to strongly nonlocal

We put forward a strategy to achieve synthetic nonlinearities where local and nonlocal contributions compete on similar footing, thus yielding intermediate tunable responses ranging from fully local to strongly nonlocal. The physical setting addressed is a semiconductor material with both Kerr and thermal nonlinearities illuminated by a pulse train with suitable single-pulse width and repetition rate. We illustrate the potential of the scheme by showing that it supports soliton properties that are not accessible in either limit of purely local or purely nonlocal media.