Ricerc@Sapienza

In this paper, we introduce the concept of spatial and spectral control of nonlinear parametric sidebands in multimode optical fibers by tailoring their linear refractive index profile. In all cases, the pump experiences Kerr self-cleaning, leading to a bell-shaped beam profile. Geometric parametric instability, owing to quasi-phase matching from the dynamic grating generated via the Kerr effect by pump self-imaging, leads to frequency multicasting of beam self-cleaning across a wideband array of sidebands.

We experimentally demonstrate high-resolution mapping of the spatio-temporal dynamics of the beam cleaning process in graded index multimode fibers. This high-resolution characterization reveals the time-dependent nature of the beam self-cleaning process.

We demonstrate Kerr self-cleaning of beams in an Ytterbium doped multimode fiber taper with exponentially decreasing nonlinearity, with no accompanying frequency conversion or spectral broadening.

We show experimentally that geometric parametric instability in graded-index multimode fibers is composed by several multimode spectral components. The experimental observation is obtained by using a new 3D technique of high-resolution spatial and spectral analysis.

We experimentally demonstrate that spatial beam self-cleaning can be highly efficient when obtained with a few-mode excitation in graded-index multimode optical fibers. By using 160 ps long, highly chirped (6 nm bandwidth at -3dB) optical pulses at 1562 nm, we demonstrate a one-decade reduction of the power threshold for spatial beam self-cleaning, with respect to previous experiments using pulses with laser wavelengths at 1030-1064 nm. Self-cleaned beams remain spatio-temporally stable for more than a decade of their peak power variation.