Compression of laser pulses in the interaction of counterpropagating waves in a medium with an inertial cubic nonlinearity

Abstract

The theory of the interaction of high-power counterpropagating laser pulses in a transparent medium with an inertial cubic nonlinearity is developed. An effect of temporal compression of pulses due to nonstationary cross-phase modulation, which results in energy exchange between the interacting pulses, is pre-dicted. It is demonstrated that the direction of energy exchange is independent of the sign of the nonlinearity parameter of a medium. For input pulses with different intensities, energy exchange can occur in the anomalous direction—from a weak pulse to a strong pulse.