Optical fibers provide a cost effective and readily accessible test bed to probe complex nonlinear wave coupling phenomena. In this talk, we describe intriguing recent theoretical developments and experimental studies involving nonlinear multimode optical fibers [1]. Exotic behaviors are observed, ranging from analog gravity coupled transient black holes in birefringent fibers [2], to the emission of arrays of multi-octave spanning powerful sidebands, and spatial beam collapse in highly multimode fibers [3-5]. All these experiments share the useful property that are carried out using relatively short spans of standard and cheap telecom optical fibers.

References

[1] Picozzi Antonio, Millot Guy, Wabnitz Stefan (2015). Nonlinear optics: Nonlinear virtues of multimode fibre. NATURE PHOTONICS, vol. 9, p. 289-291

[2] Frisquet Benoit, Kibler Bertrand, Morin Philippe, Baronio Fabio, Conforti Matteo, Millot Guy, Wabnitz Stefan (2016). Optical Dark Rogue Wave. SCIENTIFIC REPORTS, vol. 6,

[3] Wright Logan G., Wabnitz Stefan, Christodoulides Demetrios N., Wise Frank W. (2015). Ultrabroadband Dispersive Radiation by Spatiotemporal Oscillation of Multimode Waves. PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS, vol. 115

[4] K. Krupa et al., “Observation of geometric parametric instability induced by the periodic spatial self-imaging of multimode waves”, http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.04991, 2016 - accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Lett.

[5] K. Krupa et al., “Spatial beam self-cleaning in multimode fiber”, http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.02972, 2016.