Gap soliton formation by nonlinear supratransmission in Bragg media

A Bragg medium in the nonlinear Kerr regime, submitted to incident cw-radiation at a frequency in a band gap, switches from total reflection to transmission when the incident energy overcomes some threshold. We demonstrate that this is a result of nonlinear supratransmission, which allows to prove that i) the threshold incident amplitude is simply expressed in terms of the deviation from the Bragg resonance, ii) the process is not the result of a shift of the gap in the nonlinear dispersion relation, iii) the transmission does occur by means of gap soliton trains, as experimentally observed [D. Taverner et al., Opt Lett 23 (1998) 328], iv) the required energy tends to zero close to the band edge.