Doppler Shift of Self-Reflected Optical Pulses at an Interface: Dynamic Nonlinear Optical Skin Effect

Abstract

We introduce the dynamic nonlinear optical skin effect in which a pulse incident on a saturable absorbing interface is self-reflected from a moving absorption front. The motion of the front causes the self-reflected wave to be redshifted by the Doppler effect, which in turn serves as an experimentally observable signature for the front propagation.