Experimental Observation of Linear and Nonlinear Optical Bloch Oscillations

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

We experimentally demonstrate the occurrence of optical Bloch oscillations in a waveguide array with linearly growing effective index of the individual guides. We monitored the output profiles for varying propagation lengths and observed a periodic transverse motion of the field and a complete recovery of the initial excitation. The action of the focusing nonlinearity leads to a loss of recovery, symmetry breaking, and power-induced beam spreading.