Abstract

Supercontinuum generation in optical fibers has recently given rise to several surprising analogies to completely different areas of physics, including event horizon [1] and rogue waves [2]. In all these situations, there is a remarkably high nonlinearity between input and resulting output, enabling strong manipulation in the optical system. In particular, the concept of an optical event horizon can be used to induce soliton acceleration. This mechanism has been suggested for exploitation in ultrashort pulse compression [3] and also offers the functionality of an optical transistor [4]. However, experimental demonstration of such applications of the event horizon concept is still outstanding. Here, we experimentally demonstrate for the first time a beneficial exploitation of the optical event horizon scenario and the accompanied soliton acceleration process.

© 2015 IEEE