Experimental demonstration of the oscillatory snake instability of the bright soliton of the (2+1)D hyperbolic nonlinear Schrödinger equation.

The transition between the standard snake instability of bright solitons of the hyperbolic nonlinear Schrödinger equation and the recently theoretically predicted oscillatory snake instability is experimentally demonstrated. The existence of this transition is proven on the basis of spatiotemporal spectral features of bright soliton laser beams propagating in normally dispersive Kerr-type nonlinear planar waveguides.