Abstract
We study induced modulation instability in a nematic liquid crystal cell. Two broad elliptical beams along one direction are launched into the cell. The two beams have slightly different angle in order to create a sinusoidally varying intensity at the entrance of the cell. In this way, the gain of perturbations with different spatial frequency is investigated. The evolution of the optical pattern, for certain conditions, shows a recurrence of the signal. We believe that this is the manifestation of the Fermi-Pasta- Ulam recurrence and to the best of our knowledge, the first experimental observation of this phenomenon in the spatial optical domain. Numerical simulations show a good agreement with the experimental findings.
Highlights
Nematic liquid crystals have attracted a great deal of interest owing to the high optical nonlinearity available by the molecular reorientation [1]
We investigate experimentally the behavior of a periodically modulated elliptical beam in nematic liquid crystals
We show that the optical nonlinearity leads to the amplification of the spectral sidebands corresponding to the initial modulation, a phenomenon known as induced spatial modulation instability
Summary
Nematic liquid crystals have attracted a great deal of interest owing to the high optical nonlinearity available by the molecular reorientation [1]. These materials have been the subject of several recent studies of fundamental interest such as the study of higherorder solitons [3] and spontaneous modulation instability [4].
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