Beam breakup and modulational instability in a bulk type I quadratic medium

The effect of a small modulation superimposed on a strip (1D) solitary wave propagating in a bulk quadratic medium was investigated both analytically and numerically near Type I phase matching. General, exact results were obtained. By using first order perturbation theory, we obtained the gain coefficient for the modulational instability and the modulation cut-off frequency and we investigated their dependence on various beam and material parameters. The wave evolves into a clean periodic sequence of solitary waves and does not reproduce the incident beam. We showed that the beam breakup observed experimentally is due entirely to noise induced modulational instability.