0000000000073506

AUTHOR

Marc Haelterman

Attracteur de polarisation dans les fibres optiques

Nous etudions la dynamique non lineaire des etats de polarisation de deux ondes coherentes ou incoherentes se propageant dans une fibre optique. Nous presentons en particulier un effet original d'attraction de la polarisation.

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Observation of induced modulational polarization instabilities and pulse-train generation in the normal-dispersion regime of a birefringent optical fiber

Four-photon mixing in a low-birefringence fiber is strongly influenced by the orientation of the pump and signal waves with respect to the fiber axes. We experimentally investigated the dependence of the modulational gain spectra on pump power and polarization by mixing orthogonal pump and probe light beams in a birefringent optical fiber. With a pump on the fast fiber axis, a cascade of sidebands was generated in the regime of normal fiber dispersion. These sidebands are shown to correspond to 0.2–0.3-THz trains of pulses with complex polarization profiles. The analysis reveals that, at particular values of the input pump and probe powers and signal frequency detuning, trains of dark-solit…

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Observation of modulational instability induced by velocity-matched cross-phase modulation in a normally dispersive bimodal fiber

We demonstrate experimentally the existence of cross-phase-modulation-induced modulational instability in the absence of group-velocity mismatch between the interacting nonlinear dispersive waves. The experiment is performed by means of a normally dispersive isotropic bimodal fiber. The group-velocity mismatch between the fundamental and the first-order modes that constitute the two interacting waves is controlled by wavelength tuning. A strong power dependence of the modulational instability spectra is observed near the condition of group-velocity matching.

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Incoherent solitons generated in instantaneous response nonlinear Kerr media

We show theoretically and experimentally in an optical fiber system, that incoherent domain wall solitons can be generated spontaneously from incoherent light, despite of the instantaneous response of the fiber Kerr nonlinearity.

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Observation of Modulational Instability induced by a dynamical Bragg grating in an optical fiber

We present a detailed experimental study on Bragg Modulational Instability in a highly birefringent fiber. The originality of our scheme is that the index modulation is obtained through cross phase modulation with a beating wave.

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Generation of High-Repetition-Rate Dark Soliton Trains and Frequency Conversion in Optical Fibers

Induced modurational polarization instability in birefringent fibers leads to trains of dark soliton-like pulses. Optimal large-signal cw and soliton frequency conversion is also analysed.

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Experimental observation of modal attraction in optical fibers

We investigate experimentally nonlinear optical attractors based on four-photon mixing interaction of counterpropagating waves in optical fibers.

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Role of topological phase-defects in the parametric generation process

Abstract We show that topological phase-defects are spontaneously generated from noise fluctuations in the degenerate configuration of the parametric interaction. These localized coherent structures are shown to affect the coherence properties of the parametrically generated field. It is shown that the emergence of coherence in the fundamental field relies on a previously unrecognized process of mutual annihilation of pairs of neighboring phase-defects. More precisely, the density of phase-defects N , and the time correlation τ c of the generated field, are shown to exhibit a power-law behavior with the propagation length, i.e., τ c ∝ z 1 / 4 , N ∝ z - 1 / 4 .

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Vector Modulational Instabilities and Soliton Experiments

In optical fibers, the interaction between nonlinear and dispersive effects leads to phenomena such as modulational instability (MI)[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], in which a continuous or quasi-continuous wave undergoes a modulation of its amplitude or phase in the presence of noise or any other small perturbation. The perturbation can originate from quantum noise (spontaneous-MI) or from a frequency shifted signal wave (induced-MI). MI has been observed for the first time for a single pump wave propagating in a standard non birefringe.nt fiber (scalar MI)[7]. It has been shown that scalar MI only occurs when the group velocity dispersion (GVD) is negative (anomalous dispersion regime).

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Modulational instability and critical regime in a highly birefringent fiber

We report experimental observations of modulational instability of copropagating waves in a highly birefringent fiber for the normal dispersion regime. We first investigate carefully the system behavior by means of nonlinear Schr\"odinger equations and phase-matching conditions, and then, experimentally, we use two distinct techniques for observing MI (modulational instability) in the fiber; namely, the single-frequency copropagation, where two pump waves of identical frequency copropagate with orthogonal polarizations parallel to the two birefringence axes of the fiber, and the two-frequency copropagation, where the two polarized waves copropagate with different frequencies. In both cases …

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Incoherent solitons and condensation processes

International audience; We study the nonlinear interaction of partially incoherent nonlinear optical waves. We show that, in spite of the incoherence of the waves, coherent phase effects may play a relevant role during the propagation, in contrast with the usual wave turbulence description of the interaction. These nonlinear phase effects may lead the system to unexpected processes of self-organization, such as condensation, or incoherent soliton generation in instantaneous response nonlinear media. Such self-organization processes may be characterized by a reduction of the non-equilibrium entropy, which violates the Boltzmann's H-theorem of entropy growth inherent to the wave turbulence th…

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Experimental Study of Modulational Instability and Vector Solitons in Optical Fibers

This chapter brings forth the experimental study of modulational instability and vector solitons in optical fibers.

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Polarization and modal attractors in conservative counterpropagating four-wave interaction

An experimental and theoretical study of the resonant four-wave interaction scheme in the counterpropagating configuration reveals the existence of a novel attraction process in Hamiltonian systems. We show analytically that it is the specificity of the boundary conditions inherent in the counterpropagating configuration that makes attraction dynamics possible in spite of the reversible nature of the four-wave interaction. In the context of optics, this novel dynamical feature could be the basic mechanism of a universal polarizer performing total polarization conversion of unpolarized light with, in principle, 100% efficiency.

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Dark-soliton-like pulse-train generation from induced modulational polarization instability in a birefringent fiber

Theory and experiments show that the nonlinear development of the modulational polarization instability of an intense light beam in a normally dispersive, low-birefringence optical fiber leads to ultrashort dark-soliton-like trains with repetition rates in the terahertz range in the polarization orthogonal to the pump.

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Thermalization and condensation in an incoherently pumped passive optical cavity

International audience; We study theoretically and numerically the condensation and the thermalization of classical optical waves in an incoherently pumped passive Kerr cavity. We show that the dynamics of the cavity exhibits a turbulent behavior that can be described by the wave turbulence theory. A mean-field kinetic equation is derived, which reveals that, in its high finesse regime, the cavity behaves essentially as a conservative Hamiltonian system. In particular, the intracavity turbulent field is shown to relax adiabatically toward a thermodynamic equilibrium state of energy equipartition. As a consequence of this effect of wave thermalization, the incoherent optical field undergoes …

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Generation of optical domain-wall structures from modulational instability in a bimodal fiber.

We study experimentally modulational instability in a normally dispersive bimodal fiber under modal group-velocity-matching conditions. In the strong pump depletion regime, higher order sideband harmonics detected in the output spectra as well as autocorrelation measurements reveal the formation of subpicosecond domain-wall structures. Across these temporal structures the electromagnetic field distribution switches abruptly between the two transverse modes of the fiber. These structures are reminiscent of the so-called domain-wall soliton. Our results constitute therefore an experimental indication of the existence of this fundamental soliton.

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