Modulational instability in optical-microwave interaction.
The stability of continuous optical and microwave fields is studied in the presence of dispersion and second order nonlinearity. The cascade combination of optical rectification and the electro-optic effect induces modulational instability (MI) in a wide range of system parameters. It is demonstrated that MI can lead potentially to filamentation of high power optical pulses as well as the generation of terahertz radiation.