High-order breathing behaviour of solitons in a mode-locked laser

Abstract

Breathing solitons were observed in optical microresonators [1] and mode-locked lasers [2] . Breathing solitons have attracted considerable attention due to the potential ability in increasing the resolution of dual-comb source. However, the temporal evolution dynamics of breathing solitons are still rarely studied due to the limitation of the resolution in common oscilloscopes. Recently, we have established a temporal magnifier system, a time lens operating on an asynchronous way. With the aid of Raman amplification, the recording length can be improved to over five thousand roundtrips (RTs). In our recent result, we found that the creeping soliton has a snaking motion behaviour in the time domain, corresponding to a breathing dynamics in the frequency domain. By adjusting the pump power, it is easy to turn into the pulsation regime from stationary mode-locking [3] .