General features of spatiotemporal instability induced by arbitrary high-order nonlinear dispersions in metamaterials

Spatiotemporal instability (STI) in metamaterials (MMs) with a Kerr-type nonlinear polarization is investigated. A general expression for instability gain, taking account of the effects of arbitrary high-order linear and nonlinear dispersions, is derived. Special attention is paid to the general features of instability induced by nonlinear dispersion effects originating from the combination of dispersive magnetic permeability and nonlinear polarization. It is shown that, just like their linear counterparts, all even-order nonlinear dispersions not only deform the original instability regions, but also may lead to the appearance of new instability regions. However, all odd-order nonlinear dispersions always suppress STI irrespective of their signs, quite different from their linear counterparts which exert no influence on instability. Moreover, we find that, unlike the linear dispersions, the nonlinear dispersions lead to the dependence of gain peak on the spatial modulation frequency. The role of the first-order nonlinear dispersion, namely self-steepening (SS), and second-order nonlinear dispersion (SND) in STI is particularly analyzed to illustratively demonstrate the general results.