Figure 1. Overview of experiments.

(a) Global strategy for the experimental observation of the fast dynamics. Incoherent light from a 1560, nm Amplified Spontaneous Emission (ASE) source is filtered by using a Programmable Optical Filter (POF) and amplified before experiencing nonlinear propagation in a polarization maintaining fibre. Single-shot measurement of random light is achieved by using a specially designed time-microscope (TM). The TM, which maps the temporal evolution onto the spatial coordinate of a sCMOS camera, has a temporal resolution of 250 femtoseconds (see Fig. 2 and Methods for details). (b–e) Typical single-shot recordings of the fast dynamics of optical power (normalized by its mean value). Initial spectral width Δν=0.1 THz. (b) Initial condition. (c–e) Structures observed at the output of the fibre for mean powers 〈P〉=0.5 W (c), 〈P〉=2.6 W (d), 〈P〉=4. W (e).