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Nonlinear externally driven optical cavities are known to generate periodic patterns. They grow from the linearly unstable background states due to modulation instability. These periodic solutions are also known as Kerr frequency combs, which have a variety of applications in metrology. The stationary state of periodic wave trains can be explained theoretically only in weakly nonlinear regimes near the onset of the instability using the order parameter description. However, in both weakly and strongly nonlinear dissipative regimes, only numerical solutions can be found. No analytic solutions are known so far except for the homogeneous continuous wave solution. Here, we derive an analytical expression for the intracavity fully nonlinear dissipative periodic wave train profiles that provides good agreement with the results of numerical simulations. Our approach is based on empirical knowledge of the triangular shape of the frequency comb spectrum.

Supercontinuum generation (SCG) in optical fibers arises from the spectral broadening of an intense light, which results from the interplay of both linear and nonlinear optical effects. In this Letter, a nondestructive optical time domain reflectometry method is proposed for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, to measure the spatial (longitudinal) evolution of the SC induced along an optical fiber. The method was experimentally tested on highly nonlinear fibers. The experimental results are in a good agreement with the optical spectra measured at the fiber outputs.

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a long-range accelerated Brillouin optical time domain analysis (BOTDA) sensor that exploits the complementary noise reduction benefits of adaptive linear prediction and optical pulse coding. The combined technique allows using orders of magnitude less the number of averages of the backscattered BOTDA traces compared to a standard single pulse BOTDA, enabling distributed strain measurement over 10 km of a standard single mode fiber with meter-scale spatial resolution and 1.8 MHz Brillouin frequency shift resolution. By optimizing the system parameters, the measurement is achieved with only 20 averages for each Brillouin gain spectrum scanned frequency, allowing for an eight times faster strain measurement compared to the use of cyclic pulse coding alone.

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a hybrid fiber optic sensing technique that effectively combines Raman optical time domain reflectometry and in-line time-division-multiplexing for fiber Bragg grating (FBG) dynamic interrogation. The highly integrated proposed scheme employs broadband apodized low reflectivity FBGs with a single narrowband optical source and a shared receiver block, allowing for simultaneous measurements of distributed static temperature and discrete dynamic strain, over the same sensing fiber.

In spatially extended convective systems, the reflection symmetry breaking induced by drift effects leads to a striking nonlinear effect that drastically affects the formation and stability of dissipative solitons in optical parametric oscillators. The phenomenon of nonlinear-induced convection dynamics is revealed using a model of the complex quintic Ginzburg-Landau equation with nonlinear gradient terms in it. Mechanisms leading to stabilization of dissipative solitons by convection are singled out. The predictions are in very good agreement with numerical solutions found from the governing equations of the optical parametric oscillators.