Nonlinear Optical Phenomena in Periodic Structures

There is much current interest in nonlinear periodic structures for applications such as all-optical switching, optical bistability, pulse compression, and the propagation of Bragg solitons. These structures rely on the contradirectional coupling between two modes as well as the intensity-dependent phase changes between them. In this talk we review our work in this area and introduce some novel excitations known as Raman gap solitons.