Fermi-Pasta-Ulam recurrence in nonlinear fiber optics: The role of reversible and irreversible losses

The discovery of the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam (FPU) recurrence phenomenon in the 1950 s was a major step in science that later led to the discovery of solitons in nonlinear physics. More recently, it was shown that optical fibers can serve as a medium for observing the FPU phenomenon. In the present work, we have found experimentally and numerically that in the low-dispersion region of an optical fiber, the recurrence is strongly influenced by the third-order-dispersion (TOD) term. Namely, the presence of TOD leads to several disappearances and recoveries of the FPU recurrence when the central frequency of the pump wave is varied. The effect is highly nontrivial and can be explained in terms of reversible and irreversible losses caused by Cherenkov radiations interacting with a multiplicity of modes sharing the optical energy in the process of its partition.