Abstract

Following its first observation in optics in 2010, the Peregrine soliton (PS) is now recognized as one of the seminal solutions of the nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NLSE) [1]. Although it is widely believed that the PS is uniquely associated with the process of plane wave modulation instability (MI), recent theory has shown that it actually appears more generally as a universal localized structure emerging during high power nonlinear pulse propagation [2]. Some evidence for this has already been seen in partially coherent nonlinear propagation in optical fibers [3], but in this paper, we use frequency-resolved optical gating to fully characterize an evolving high-order optical soliton around the first point of compression, and quantitatively confirm theoretical predictions that the properties of the compressed pulse and pedestal can indeed be interpreted in terms of the PS solution.

© 2017 IEEE