Modulational instability of bright solitons of the hyperbolic nonlinear Schrödinger equation

In this paper, the authors report on the experimental study of the snake instability spectrum of solitons. The experiment was performed by propagating a laser beam in a normally dispersive nonlinear planar waveguide made of AlGaAs. A picosecond pulsed laser source, was used so that the pulse duration is much longer than the period of the temporal modulation. In order to control the frequency of the snake instability, a frequency controlled seed beam is simultaneously launched in the waveguide together with the soliton beam which is centred on 1535 nm.