Experimental observation of stochastic, periodic, and localized light structures in a brillouin cavity system

Abstract

It has been an important research subject to find new nonlinear optical phenomena. In this paper, we report the experimental observation of stochastic, periodic, and localized light structures in a super long single-mode standard fiber with external optical feedback provided by the fiber end. The end facet reflection provides an analogous Fabry-Perot stimulated Brillouin resonator cavity. By increasing the pump power to exceed stimulated Brillouin scattering threshold, we observed light structures exhibiting extremely rich temporal-pulse characteristics that had never been reported in literature before, including supercontinuum background generation, the localization of periodic optical structure formation, fission, and compression. These optical structures are of period-doubling distribution and have different recurrence rates. What is more interesting is that we have observed sets of low frequency bipolar cycle-pulse trains that is often seen in the electrical field and hardly seen in pure optical system. Real-time specification of dynamical temporal regimes of laser operation may bring new insight into rich underlying nonlinear physics of practical fiber cavity systems. Therefore, some new nonlinear optical phenomena have been observed.