Nature of soliton interaction in fiber lasers with continuous external optical injection

Abstract

It has been shown by numerical simulation that the nonlinear interaction between a laser soliton and an injected monochromatic cw results in their phase locking. As a consequence, the velocity of the soliton begins to depend on the amplitude and frequency of the injected radiation. It has been found that if the frequency of the external signal coincides with the frequency of the dispersive waves emitted by solitons in a laser cavity with lumped intracavity elements, a mechanism for controlling long-range soliton interaction occurs. This mechanism is related to the interference between the injected wave and the dispersive waves involved in the strong long-range interaction between solitons. We have demonstrated the mechanism of soliton-soliton repulsion and, as its consequence, the occurrence of harmonic passive mode locking (multipulse generation with an equidistant arrangement of identical solitons in the laser cavity).