In the framework of the paraxial and of the slowly varying envelope approximations, with reference to a normally dispersive medium or to vacuum, I report a new approach to field quantization. The electromagnetic field is given as a continuous superposition of non-dispersive and non-diffracting wave-packets (namely X-waves). This enables a new representation of a pulsed beam as a quantum fluid. ...

In the framework of the paraxial and of the slowly varying envelope approximations, with reference to a normally dispersive medium or to vacuum, I report a new approach to field quantization. The electromagnetic field is given as a continuous superposition of non-dispersive and non-diffracting wave-packets (namely X-waves). This enables a new representation of a pulsed beam as a quantum fluid. ...

Intense laser pulses excite a nonlinear polarization response that may create an effective flowing medium and, under appropriate conditions, a blocking horizon for light. Here, we analyze in detail the interaction of light with such laser-induced flowing media, fully accounting for the medium dispersion properties. An analytical model based on a first Born approximation is found to be in excell...

We investigate experimentally the absorptive and dispersive properties of the triple-resonant optical parametric amplifier (OPA) for the degenerate subharmonic field. In the experiment the subharmonic field is utilized as the probe field and the harmonic wave as the pump field. We demonstrate that the electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT)-like effect can be simulated in the triple-reso...

It is demonstrated that optical solitons can propagate in a dispersive (or diffractive) medium with competing quadratic [i.e., chi((2))] and cubic [i.e., chi((3))] nonlinearities. Strong interplay between the nonlinearities leads to novel effects, in particular the following: (i) stable bright solitons can still exist in a self-defocusing (owing to cubic nonlinearity) medium supported by quadra...