Spatiotemporal instability in dispersive nonlinear Kerr medium with a finite response time

We investigated the spatiotemporal modulation instability (MI) in a medium with a non-instantaneous Kerr response in which the nonlinear contribution to the refractive index is governed by a relaxing Debye type equation. The expression for the MI gain spectrum in non-instantaneous Kerr medium is obtained, which clearly reveals the influence of the finite time of the nonlinear response (relaxation effect) on the spatiotemporal MI. It is shown that, due to the relaxation effect, the spatiotemporal MI can appear for the case of anomalous dispersion and defocusing nonlinearity, while it cannot appear in instantaneous Kerr medium for the same case, and a new MI gain spectrum appears, adding to the conventional MI gain spectrum similar to that in an instantaneous Ker medium. In addition, the bandwidth of MI gain spectrum is extended and the maximum MI gain is reduced with increasing of the relaxation time. Interestingly, spatiotemporal MI can appear for any spatial frequencies in non-instantaneous Kerr medium for any combination of dispersion and nonlinearity. We have performed an experiment of MI in carbon disulfide (CS2), a typical non-instantaneous Kerr medium, which shows quantitative agreement with the theoretical analyses. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.