Propagation of instability fronts in modulationally unstable systems

Abstract

We study evolution of pulses propagating through focusing nonlinear media. Small disturbance on the smooth initial non-uniform background leads to formation of the region of strong nonlinear oscillations. We develop here an asymptotic method for finding the law of motion of the front of this region. The method is applied to the focusing nonlinear Schroedinger equation for the particular cases of Talanov and Akhmanov-Sukhorukov-Khokhlov initial distributions with zero initial phase. The approximate analytical results agree well with the exact numerical solutions for these two problems.