International audienceThe Peregrine soliton is a localized nonlinear structure predicted to exist over 25 years ago, but not so far experimentally observed in any physical system. It is of fundamental significance because it is localized in both time and space, and because it defines the limit of a wide class of solutions to the nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NLSE). Here, we use an analytic description of NLSE breather propagation to implement experiments in optical fibre generating femtosecond pulses with strong temporal and spatial localization, and near-ideal temporal Peregrine soliton characteristics. In showing that Peregrine soliton characteristics appear with initial conditions that do not correspond to the mathematical ideal, our results may impact widely on studies of hydrodynamic wave instabilities where the Peregrine soliton is considered a freak-wave prototyp

The nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NLSE) is a central model of nonlinear science, applying to hydrodynamics, plasma physics, molecular biology and optics. The NLSE admits only few elementary analytic solutions, but one in particular describing a localized soliton on a finite background is of intense current interest in the context of understanding the physics of extreme waves. However, although the first solution of this type was the Kuznetzov-Ma (KM) soliton derived in 1977, there have in fact been no quantitative experiments confirming its validity. We report here novel experiments in optical fibre that confirm the KM soliton theory, completing an important series of experiments that have now observed a complete family of soliton on background solutions to the NLSE. Our results also show that KM dynamics appear more universally than for the specific conditions originally considered, and can be interpreted as an analytic description of Fermi-Pasta-Ulam recurrence in NLSE propagation.