Search

We study analytically, numerically, and experimentally the nonlinear symmetry breaking induced by broken reflection symmetry in an optical fiber system. In particular, we investigate the modulation instability regime and reveal the key role of the third-order dispersion on the asymmetry in the spectrum of the dissipative structures. Our theory explains early observations, and the predictions are in excellent agreement with our experimental findings.

The transition between the standard snake instability of bright solitons of the hyperbolic nonlinear Schrödinger equation and the recently theoretically predicted oscillatory snake instability is experimentally demonstrated. The existence of this transition is proven on the basis of spatiotemporal spectral features of bright soliton laser beams propagating in normally dispersive Kerr-type nonlinear planar waveguides.

The breakup of spatial bright optical solitons due to oscillatory neck instability is experimentally studied by propagating a laser beam in normally dispersive and self-focusing Kerr media. This intriguing and unusual phenomenon, recently predicted for solitons of the (2+1)-dimensional hyperbolic nonlinear Schrödinger (NLS) equation, is observed in the spatially resolved temporal spectrum. The snake instability that is known to occur in hyperbolic systems is also demonstrated to validate our experimental approach. Our results not only apply to photonics but also to other fields of physics, such as hydrodynamics or plasma physics, in which the hyperbolic NLS equation is used as a canonical model.

Error filtration is a method for encoding the quantum state of a single particle into a higher dimensional Hilbert space in such a way that it becomes less sensitive to noise. We have realized a fiber optics demonstration of this method and illustrated its potentialities by carrying out the optical part of a quantum key distribution scheme over a line whose phase noise is too high for a standard implementation of BB84 to be secure. By filtering out the noise, a bit error rate of 15.3% +/- 0.1%, which is beyond the security limit, can be reduced to 10.6% +/- 0.1%, thereby guaranteeing the cryptographic security.

We study experimentally the snake instability of the bright soliton stripe of the (2+1)-dimensional hyperbolic nonlinear Schrödinger equation. The instability is observed, through spectral measurements, on spatially extended femtosecond pulses propagating in a normally dispersive self-defocusing semiconductor planar waveguide.

We report on a fiber-optics implementation of the Deutsch-Jozsa and Bernstein-Vazirani quantum algorithms for 8-point functions. The measured visibility of the 8-path interferometer is about 97.5%. Potential applications of our setup to quantum communication or cryptographic protocols using several qubits are discussed.

We show experimentally that the two-component multimode spatial optical vector soliton, i.e., a two-hump self-guided laser beam, exhibits in Kerr media a sharp space-inversion symmetry-breaking instability. The experiment is performed in a CS2 planar waveguide using the orthogonal circular polarization states of light as the two components of the vector soliton.

Through a detailed spectral analysis of the propagation of square-shaped laser pulses in optical fibers, we provide the experimental demonstration of the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam recurrence phenomenon in modulationally unstable optical waves ruled by the nonlinear Schrödinger equation.