Observation of the Formation of an Optical Intensity Shock and Wave Breaking in the Nonlinear Propagation of Pulses in Optical Fibers

Abstract

We have observed the formation of an optical intensity shock and the subsequent wave breaking in the nonlinear propagation of 1-psec pulses in an optical fiber. The wave breaking manifests itself as the appearance of oscillations trailing the shock, which are due to the beating of widely

Experimental Generation of Riemann Waves in Optics: A Route to Shock Wave Control

“…In essence, until the shock point, the profiles obtained from the NLSE or the IBE are indistinguishable, illustrating how the Riemann pulse maintains its proportionality between chirp and amplitude. For z ≥ 500 m, however, the IBE approximation loses validity due to the increasing effect of dispersive regularization: Although unnoticeable in the power profile of the pulse (which lays on a null background [36,37]), chirp oscillations develop on its trailing edge as a typical signature of dispersive shock wave formation [9,14,32,33,[38][39][40].…”

Observation of Dispersive Shock Waves, Solitons, and Their Interactions in Viscous Fluid Conduits

“…However, all DSW studies to date have been severely constrained by expensive laboratory setups [2,3,5,7] or challenging field studies [8], difficulties in capturing dynamical information [2,3,6], complex physical modeling [8], or a loss of coherence due to multi-dimensional instabilities [2,4] or dissipation [5,9]. Here we report on a novel dispersive hydrodynamics testbed that circumvents all of these difficulties: the effective superflow of interfacial waves between two high viscosity contrast, low Reynolds number Stokes fluids.…”

“…Dispersive shock waves and solitons are ubiquitous excitations in dispersive hydrodynamics, having been observed in many environments such as quantum shocks in quantum systems (ultra-cold atoms [2,3], semiconductor cavities [4], electron beams [5]), optical shocks in nonlinear photonics [6], undular bores in geophysical fluids [7,8], and collisionless shocks in rarefied plasma [9]. However, all DSW studies to date have been severely constrained by expensive laboratory setups [2,3,5,7] or challenging field studies [8], difficulties in capturing dynamical information [2,3,6], complex physical modeling [8], or a loss of coherence due to multi-dimensional instabilities [2,4] or dissipation [5,9].…”

Weak Langmuir optical turbulence in a fiber cavity

“…As discussed in detail in [7], the dispersive shock wave reported here develops in the spectral evolution of the incoherent wave. It is thus of fundamental different nature than the conventional dispersive shocks that develop either in the spatial or the temporal domain from coherent disturbances, which have been experimentally observed in ion-acoustic waves [100], water surface gravity waves [101], and fiber optics [102], and have recently regained great interest in optics [103][104][105][106][107][108][109][110][111][112]. Coherent dispersive shocks and their stationary analogues have shown to play a role also in passive cavity configurations [113][114][115], where one can envisage that they can impact the generation of combs in the normal dispersion regime [116,117].…”