Statistical properties of nonlinear stage of modulation instability in fiber optics

Abstract: We present an optical fiber experiment in which we examine the space-time evolution of a modulationally unstable plane wave initially perturbed by a small noise. Using a recirculating fiber loop as experimental platform, we report the single-shot observation of the noise-driven development of breather structures from the early stage to the long-term evolution of modulation instability. Performing single-point statistical analysis of optical power recorded in the experiments, we observe decaying oscillations of the second-order moment together with the exponential distribution in the long term evolution, as predicted in [D.\,S. Agafontsev and V.\,E. Zakharov, Nonlinearity {\bf 28}, 2791 (2015)]. Finally, we demonstrate experimentally and numerically that the autocorrelation of the optical power $g^{(2)}(\tau)$ exhibits some unique oscillatory features typifying the nonlinear stage of the noise-driven modulation instability and of integrable turbulence