AUTHOR=Jauberteau Raphaël , Wehbi Sahar , Mansuryan Tigran , Krupa Katarzyna , Baronio Fabio , Wetzel Benjamin , Tonello Alessandro , Wabnitz Stefan , Couderc Vincent TITLE=Boosting and Taming Wave Breakup in Second Harmonic Generation JOURNAL=Frontiers in Physics VOLUME=9 YEAR=2021 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/physics/articles/10.3389/fphy.2021.640025 DOI=10.3389/fphy.2021.640025 ISSN=2296-424X ABSTRACT=

Modulation instability is a universal phenomenon that can be found in a wide variety of nonlinear systems where, in the presence of a noise seed, peaks of random intensities can be generated. Several dynamical systems admit exact solutions in the form of breathers or solitons on a finite background. The vast majority of soliton studies has been restricted so far to one-dimensional systems. In contrast, the occurrences of localized structures in fully spatiotemporal systems has been only sporadically explored. In this work, we experimentally study the conditions for the wave-breaking of spatially extended optical beams in the process of second harmonic generation. Whenever the pump energy of the picosecond-long fundamental beam reaches a critical level, the beam shape at the second harmonic in a KTP crystal breaks into small filaments. These filaments exhibit extreme local intensity peaks, and their statistical distribution can be modified by the input energy of the fundamental beam. Moreover, by analyzing similar wave-breaking dynamics in a PPLN crystal in the presence of a higher nonlinear quadratic response, we observe that the spatial beam breaking may even gradually vanish as the laser intensity grows larger, leading to a spatial reshaping into a smooth and wider beam, accompanied by a substantial broadening of its temporal spectrum.