Experimental Observation of Linear and Nonlinear Optical Bloch Oscillations

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Abstract
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.