Advanced Spatiotemporal Manipulation of Nonlinear Waves and Solitons Using a Recirculating Fiber Loop

Manipulating and shaping the properties of rapidly varying optical waves is an essential operation with numerous practical applications that is also of fundamental interest for investigating intricate nonlinear processes. In that context, optical fiber systems happen to be extremely versatile platforms that nevertheless suffer major limitations owing to the technical impossibility for the experimenter to interact or even observe the wavefield as it propagates. Recirculating optical fiber loops, historically developed to study long-haul transmissions of solitonic pulses [1] are particularly interesting in this respect as they enable periodic access to the propagating field and have already been used in this sense for instance to stabilize the propagation of solitons [2] or more recently to study optical Bloch oscillations [3] using simple intra-loop modulation techniques. In this work, we developed a new experimental system based on a recirculating fiber loop that enables arbitrary phase modulation of the optical wavefield in both space and time. This generates an effective potential that can be used to greatly manipulate the space-time dynamics of light.