Generalized retarded response of nonlinear media and its influence on soliton dynamics.

We demonstrate by means of numerical simulations of the generalized Nonlinear Schrödinger Equation that the retarded response of a nonlinear medium embedded in a single hole of a photonic crystal fiber crucially affects the spectrum generated by ultrashort laser pulses. By introducing a hypothetic medium with fixed dispersion and nonlinearity and with a variable retarded response, we are able to separate the influence of the retarded response from other effects. We show that the fission length of a launched higher-order soliton dramatically increases if the characteristic time of the retarded response is close to the input pulse duration. Furthermore, we investigate the effect of the retarded response on the soliton self-frequency shift and find that the optimum input pulse duration for maximizing the spectral width has to be shortened for a larger characteristic retarded response time. Our work has important implications on future studies of spatiotemporal solitons in selectively liquid-filled photonic crystal fibers.