Experimental study of the reversible behavior of modulational instability in optical fibers

We report what is to our knowledge the first clear-cut experimental evidence of the reversibility of modulational instability in dispersive Kerr media. It was possible to perform this experiment with standard telecommunication fiber because we used a specially designed 550-ps square-pulse laser source based on the two-wavelength configuration of a nonlinear optical loop mirror. Our observations demonstrate that reversibility is due to well-balanced and synchronous energy transfer among a significant number of spectral wave components. These results provide what we believe is the first evidence, in the field of nonlinear optics, of the universal Fermi-Pasta-Ulam recurrence phenomenon that has been predicted for a large number of conservative nonlinear systems, including those described by a nonlinear Schrödinger equation that is relevant to the context of the present study.