Abstract
Modulational instabilities in nonlinear dispersive or diffractive media lead to the break-up of continuous wave (cw) intense beams into trains of ultrashort pulses or to self-filamentation, respectively. In the context of optical fibers, modulational instabilities lead to solium generation in the anomalous dispersion regime. In the normal dispersion regime, instabilities may occur through the coupling between orthogonal polarizations.1 In particular, in weakly birefringent fibers the the optical Kerr effect may cancel the natural birefringence, and a cw spatial instability of the state of polarization of light results.2,3 This effect leads to modulational polarization instability (MPI) in the mixing between different frequency components in fibers.4 Previous experiments indicate the presence of a cw polarization instability5 and spontaneous (or noise-seeded) MPI was recently reported.6 To date, no experimental evidence of MPI in the frequency conversion, of light waves in fibers was yet available.
© 1997 Optical Society of America
PDF ArticleMore Like This
S. Trillo and S. Wabnitz
FB.6 Optical Bistability (OBI) 1988
G. K. L. Wong, R. J. Kruhlak, R. Leonhardt, J. D. Harvey, N. Y. Joly, J. C. Knight, W. J. Wadsworth, and P. St. J. Russell
TuD2 Nonlinear Guided Waves and Their Applications (NP) 2005
Pascal Kockaert and Marc Haelterman
QWI3 Quantum Electronics and Laser Science Conference (CLEO:FS) 1999