Some models of propagation of extremely short electromagnetic pulses in a nonlinear medium

Some cases of model media considered in this paper allow analytical solutions to nonlinear wave equations to be found and the time dependence of the electric field strength to be determined in the explicit form for arbitrarily short electromagnetic pulses. Our analysis does not employ any assumptions concerning a harmonic carrier wave or the variation rate of the field in such pulses. The class of models considered includes two-level resonance and quasi-resonance systems. Nonresonance media are analysed in terms of models of anharmonic oscillators - the Duffing and Lorentz models. In most cases, only particular solutions describing the stationary propagation of a video pulse (a unipolar transient of the electric field or a pulse including a small number of oscillations of the electric field around zero) can be found. These solutions correspond to sufficiently strong electromagnetic fields when the dispersion inherent in the medium is suppressed by nonlinear processes. (invited paper)