Temporal soliton-like pulses in AlGaAs waveguides

In this paper we present our initial results on soliton like pulses in AlGaAs waveguides. We can identify two regimes of interest: a) when the dispersion is anomalous and the nonlinearity, n₂, is positive. An almost ideal Kerr nonlinearity can be utilised by operating in the half band gap region of the semiconductor. In this spectral region the nonlinearity is positive and the dispersion is normal, initially indicating that temporal solitons should not exist. Here we will describe experiments in which we control the dispersion by use of an anti-resonant reflecting optical waveguide (ARROW); b) when the dispersion is normal and the nonlinearity is negative