Emission of dispersive waves from solitons in axially-varying optical fibers

TL;DR

This paper explores how axially-varying optical fibers can be engineered to control soliton behavior and dispersive wave emission, enabling new nonlinear pulse dynamics and unique dispersive wave phenomena.

Contribution

It demonstrates the impact of meter-scale longitudinal dispersion variations on soliton and dispersive wave dynamics, revealing novel phenomena not observable in uniform fibers.

Findings

Observation of cascaded dispersive wave emission

Control of polychromatic dispersive waves

Experimental demonstration of tailored fiber effects

Abstract

The possibility of tailoring the guidance properties of optical fibers along the same direction as the evolution of the optical field allows to explore new directions in nonlinear fiber optics. The new degree of freedom offered by axially-varying optical fibers enables to revisit well-established nonlinear phenomena, and even to discover novel short pulse nonlinear dynamics. Here we study the impact of meter-scale longitudinal variations of group velocity dispersion on the propagation of bright solitons and on their associated dispersive waves. We show that the longitudinal tailoring of fiber properties allows to observe experimentally unique dispersive waves dynamics, such as the emission of cascaded, multiple or polychromatic dispersive waves.