Truncated thermalization of incoherent optical waves through supercontinuum generation in photonic crystal fibers

We revisit the process of optical wave thermalization through supercontinuum generation in photonic crystal fibers. We report theoretically and numerically a phenomenon of `truncated thermalization': The incoherent optical wave exhibits an irreversible evolution toward a Rayleigh-Jeans thermodynamic equilibrium state characterized by a compactly supported spectral shape. The theory then reveals the existence of a frequency cut-off which regularizes the ultraviolet catastrophe inherent to ensembles of classical nonlinear waves. This phenomenon sheds new light on the mechanisms underlying the formation of bounded supercontinuum spectra in photonic crystal fibers.

Dynamical threshold enhancement and resummation in Drell-Yan production

Partonic cross sections for the production of massive objects in hadronic collisions receive large corrections when the invariant mass of the initial-state partons is just above the production threshold. Since typically the center-of-mass energy of the hadronic collision is much higher than the mass of the heavy objects, it is not obvious that these contributions translate into large corrections to the hadronic cross section. Using a recent approach to threshold resummation based on effective field theory, we quantify to which extent the fall-off of the parton densities at high x leads to a dynamical enhancement of the partonic threshold region. With the example of Drell-Yan production, we …

Introduction to Wave Turbulence Formalisms for Incoherent Optical Waves

We provide an introduction to different wave turbulence formalisms describing the propagation of partially incoherent optical waves in nonlinear media. We consider the nonlinear Schrodinger equation as a representative model accounting for a nonlocal or a noninstantaneous nonlinearity, as well as higher-order dispersion effects. We discuss the wave turbulence kinetic equation describing, e.g., wave condensation or wave thermalization through supercontinuum generation; the Vlasov formalism describing incoherent modulational instabilities and the formation of large scale incoherent localized structures in analogy with long-range gravitational systems; and the weak Langmuir turbulence formalis…

Optical Wave Turbulence in Fibers

Giant collective incoherent shock waves in strongly nonlinear turbulent flows

Contrary to conventional coherent shocks, we show theoretically and experimentally that nonlocal turbulent flows lead to the emergence of large-scale incoherent shock waves, which constitute a collective phenomenon of the incoherent field as a whole.

Phase evolution of Peregrine-like solitons in nonlinear fiber optics

Optical fiber systems are well-known to provide convenient platforms in which one may investigate a large variety of fascinating fundamental nonlinear coherent structures such as solitons or self-similar patterns. Interestingly, one of the major conclusions of the studies dealing with extreme-value fluctuations is that the temporal and spectral characteristics of localization processes can be well described in terms of solitons over finite background and in particular in terms of Peregrine soliton (PS) [1]. Whereas the longitudinal evolution of the temporal and spectral intensity of the PS have been characterized in detail [2], much less attention has been experimentally devoted to the evol…

Le soliton Peregrine, une onde fondamentale des dynamiques non-linéaires

National audience; Des ondes très variées sont régies par l’équation de Schrödinger non-linéaire : la lumière dans les fibres optiques, les vagues océaniques, les ondes dans les plasmas, les condensats de Bose-Einstein… Quand la non-linéarité compense la dispersion, un soliton peut se propager tout en maintenant ses caractéristiques temporelles et spectrales inchangées. En présence d’une onde continue, une autre onde non-linéaire existe : le soliton Peregrine (PS), prédit dès 1983 [1] mais démontré expérimentalement seulement en 2010 [2]. Au contraire du soliton usuel, le PS apparait de nulle part, concentre temporellement et spatialement son énergie, puis disparait sans laisser de trace.Le…

Long-Range interaction of temporal incoherent solitons

Contrary to conventional solitons, temporal incoherent solitons are sustained by a defocusing nonlinearity with anomalous dispersion and exhibit a non-mutual attractive-repulsive interaction. We explain these results by a long-range Vlasov formalism.

Impact of self-steepening on incoherent dispersive spectral shocks and collapse-like spectral singularities

International audience; Incoherent dispersive shock waves and collapselike singularities have been recently predicted to occur in the spectral evolution of an incoherent optical wave that propagates in a noninstantaneous nonlinear medium. Here we extend this work by considering the generalized nonlinear Schrödinger equation. We show that self-steepening significantly affects these incoherent spectral singularities: (i) It leads to a delay in the development of incoherent dispersive shocks, and (ii) it arrests the incoherent collapse singularity. Furthermore, we show that the spectral collapselike behavior can be exploited to achieve a significant enhancement (by two orders of magnitudes) of…

Control of Space-Time Trajectories of Noise-Driven Optical Extreme Events in Metamaterial Waveguides

Metamaterials offer the potential to precisely manipulate electromagnetic wave propagation in ways that cannot be achieved with materials found in nature. The formation and propagation of optical spatial solitons in metamaterials has been already investigated [1]. Here we report the theoretical and numerical investigations on temporal-spectral dynamics of nonlinear extreme events arising from the initial noise-perturbed plane wave in metamaterial waveguides. A typical waveguide structure used here is a planar structure with a metamaterial core and a part of the structure, in the form of the substrate, is replaced with a magnetooptic material. We assume that the core material is isotropic an…

Spectral long-range interaction of temporal incoherent solitons.

We study the interaction of temporal incoherent solitons sustained by a highly noninstantaneous (Raman-like) nonlinear response. The incoherent solitons exhibit a nonmutual interaction, which can be either attractive or repulsive depending on their relative initial distance. The analysis reveals that incoherent solitons exhibit a long-range interaction in frequency space, which is in contrast with the expected spectral short-range interaction described by the usual approach based on the Raman-like spectral gain curve. Both phenomena of anomalous interaction and spectral long-range behavior of incoherent solitons are described in detail by a long-range Vlasov equation.

Incoherent Dispersive Shocks and Spectral Collapse

We predict the existence of incoherent dispersive shock waves and collapse-like singularities that occur in the spectral evolution of incoherent optical waves propagating in a noninstantaneous nonlinear medium.

Catastrophic process of coherence degradation

We predict a catastrophic process of coherence degradation characterized by a virtually unlimited spectral broadening of the waves. This effect is described by self-similar solutions of the kinetic equations inherent to the wave turbulence theory.

Performances of the Alpha-X RF gun on the PHIL accelerator at LAL

International audience; The Alpha-X RF-gun was designed to produce an ultra-short (<100 fs rms), 100 pC and 6.3 MeV electron beam with a normalized rms transverse emittance of 1π mm mrad for a gun peak accelerating field of 100 MV/m. Such beams will be required by the Alpha-X project, which aims to study a laser-driven plasma accelerator with a short wavelength accelerating medium. It has been demonstrated on PHIL (Photo-Injector at LAL) that the coaxial RF coupling, chosen to preserve the gun field cylindrical symmetry, is perfectly understood and allows reaching the required peak accelerating field of 100 MV/m giving beam energy of 6.3 MeV. Moreover, a quite low beam rms relative energy s…

Optical Cavity-Less 40-GHz Picosecond Pulse Generator in the Visible Wavelength Range

International audience; High-repetition-rate optical frequency-comb sources emitting picosecond pulses play important roles in variousscientific researches and industrial applications. Such ultrafast pulse sources are mostly generated in opticalcavities or microresonators. By means of the wavelength-conversion techniques, it is possible to transfer thecavity-based near-IR robust and compact sources to the mid-IR or to the visible wavelength regions [1-2], forwhich there is an increasing demand, for biophotonics and other applications. Here we demonstrate the generationof high-repetition-rate picosecond pulses in the visible wavelength range by using a fully optical cavity-lessconfiguration.…

Temporal Dynamics of Incoherent Nonlinear Waves

We review different formalisms describing incoherent waves: the wave turbulence kinetic equation, the Vlasov equation in analogy with Gravitation, the weak Langmuir turbulence equation describing spectral solitons and incoherent dispersive shocks.

Spectral dynamics of incoherent waves with a noninstantaneous nonlinear response

We study the influence of a constant background noise on the dynamics of spectral incoherent solitons, which are incoherent structures sustained by a noninstantaneous (Raman-like) nonlinearity. As the level of the noise background increases, the incoherent wave enters a novel nonlinear regime characterized by oscillatory dynamics of the incoherent spectrum, which develop within a spectral cone during the propagation. In contrast to the conventional Raman-like spectral red shift, such incoherent spectral dynamics can be characterized by a significant spectral blue shift. On the basis of the kinetic wave theory, we derive explicit analytical expressions of these incoherent oscillatory spectra…

Nonlinear topological symmetry protection in a dissipative system

We report an experimental and theoretical investigation of a system whose dynamics is dominated by an intricate interplay between three key concepts of modern physics: topology, nonlinearity, and spontaneous symmetry breaking. The experiment is based on a two-mode coherently-driven optical resonator in which photons interact through the Kerr nonlinearity. In presence of a phase defect between the modes, a nonlinear attractor develops, which confers a synthetic M\"obius topology to the modal structure of the system. That topology is associated with an inherently protected exchange symmetry between the modes, enabling the realization of spontaneous symmetry breaking in ideal, bias-free, condi…

Shock-induced complex phase-space dynamics of strongly turbulent flows

Shock waves have been thoroughly investigated during the last century in many different branches of physics. In conservative (Hamiltonian) systems the shock singularity is regularized by weak wave dispersion, thus leading to the formation of a rapidly and regular oscillating structure, usually termed in the literature dispersive shock wave (DSW), see e.g. [1]. Here, we show that this fundamental singular process of DSW formation can break down in a system of incoherent nonlinear waves. We consider the strong turbulent regime of a system of nonlocal nonlinear optical waves. We report theoretically and experimentally a characteristic transition: Strengthening the nonlocal character of the non…

Incoherent dispersive shocks in the spectral evolution of random waves

We predict theoretically and numerically the existence of incoherent dispersive shock waves. They manifest themselves as an unstable singular behavior of the spectrum of incoherent waves that evolve in a noninstantaneous nonlinear environment. This phenomenon of "spectral wave breaking" develops in the weakly nonlinear regime of the random wave. We elaborate a general theoretical formulation of these incoherent objects on the basis of a weakly nonlinear statistical approach: a family of singular integro-differential kinetic equations is derived, which provides a detailed deterministic description of the incoherent dispersive shock wave phenomenon.

Giant collective incoherent shock waves in strong turbulence

Contrary to conventional coherent shocks, we show theoretically and experimentally that nonlocal turbulent flows lead to the emergence of large-scale incoherent shock waves, which constitute a collective phenomenon of the incoherent field as a whole.

Emergence of long-range phase coherence in nonlocal nonlinear media

The emergence of long range phase coherence among random nonlinear waves is a fascinating effect that characterizes many fundamental phenomena. For instance, the condensation of classical waves [1,2] is an important example of self-organization process that generates lot of interest as a classical analogue of quantum Bose-Einstein condensation. Wave condensation is known to be characterized by the emergence of long-range order and phase-coherence, in the sense that the correlation function of the wave amplitude does not decay at infinity. This property of long range phase coherence is fundamental, for instance for the manifestation of superfluid behaviors, or the generation of Bogoliubov so…