文摘
In this paper, we investigate the behavior of modulation instability(MI) induced by nonlinear diffraction (NLD) resulting from the vectoral effect in metamaterials with simultaneous Kerr-type electric and magnetic nonlinearity, trying to unfold some novel properties different from those in conventional positive-index media(CM). First, NLD in metamaterials differs from CM mainly in that its value is able to be positive or negative, which provides greater flexibility for us to control the dynamical behavior of MI. Then, we further show that NLD exerts strong influence upon the MI scenario for both defocusing and focusing nonlinear cases, depending on its magnitude and sign. Moreover, we demonstrate NLD can make MI possible even in metamaterials with focusing nonlinearity of negative diffraction case. Finally, we observe NLD under certain limits can open up a new modulation window with an infinite modulation frequency range unseen in conventional MI scenario. Our results denote that NLD in metamaterials can provide us a more powerful strategy to engineer the behavior of MI, as compared with the counterpart in CM.