EVENT DETAILS AND ABSTRACT

Title: Self Focusing of Circularly-polarized Beams
Speaker: Gadi Fibich
Speaker Info: Tel Aviv University
Brief Description:
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Abstract:

In this talk we present a systematic study of propagation of circularly polarized beams in a Kerr medium. In contrast to previous studies,vectorial effects and nonparaxiality are not neglected in the derivation. We show that the standard model in the Literature for self- focusing of circularly-polarized beams can lead to completely wrong results, that circular polarization is stable during self-focusing, and that nonparaxiality and vectorial effects arrest collapse. We also show that circularly polarized beams are much less likely to undergo multiple filamentation than linearly-polarized beams. This is a joint work with B. Ilan.