Spatiotemporal Characterization of Nonlinear Interactions between Selectively Excited Radially Symmetric Modes of a Few-Mode Fiber

Nonlinear propagation of signals in single-mode fiber is well understood, and is typically observed by measuring the temporal profile or optical spectrum of an emerging signal. In multimode fibers, the nonlinearity has both a spatial and a temporal element, and a complete investigation of the interactions between propagating modes requires resolving the output in both space and time. We report here spatiotemporal measurements of two nonlinear interacting LP$_{0m}$ modes of a step-index few-mode fiber (FMF). We describe a method to selectively excite two propagating modes through the use of a phase-mask directly patterned on the entrance face of the fiber. The output is resolved by raster-scanning a near-field tapered single-mode optical fiber probe that is connected to a high-speed detector. The results show that in the presence of nonlinearity, the output exhibits a spatiotemporal character that cannot be adequately characterized by a camera image or pulse shape alone.