Huge soliton explosions in an ultrafast fiber laser

Abstract

Due to the unique nonlinear dynamic of soliton explosions, they have attracted much attention in ultrafast laser community since Akhmediev et al. theoretically discovered them in 2000. In the soliton explosion regime, the spectrum of soliton would collapse abruptly and then come back to its original state [1]. However, due to the transient property of soliton explosions and the limitations of real-time instruments, most of the researches were focused on the numerical studies and so far only few works have reported the experimental observation of soliton explosions in ultrafast lasers [2, 3]. Recently, it was found that the shot-to-shot spectra of soliton could be observed on the oscilloscope by taking advantage of the dispersive Fourier transformation (DFT) technique [4, 5], which made it possible to fully capture and investigate the whole process of soliton explosions in a real-time method. In this talk, we demonstrated the observation of soliton explosions with much longer time period than previous reports in an ultrafast erbium-doped fiber laser by using DFT technique. With the increase of pump power level, the soliton explosions occurred between the stable mode-locking operation and noise-like soliton operation. Specially, during the soliton explosions regime, by increasing the pump power to 23.6mW and adjusting the polarization controllers slightly, the conventional soliton explosion would turn into huge soliton explosion, where the soliton exploded one after another. The experimental observations would deepen the understanding of physical mechanisms of soliton explosions, which might be useful to the communities interested in soliton explosions.