Abstract
We demonstrate an experimental approach to create dissipative solitons in a microcavity laser. In particular, we shape the spatial gain profile of a quasi-one-dimensional microcavity laser with a nonresonant, pulsed optical pump to create spatially localised structures, called gain-pinned dissipative solitons that exist due to the balance of gain and nonlinear losses and are confined to a diffraction-limited volume. The ultrafast formation dynamics and decay of the gain-pinned solitons are probed directly, showing that they are created on a picosecond timescale, orders of magnitude faster than laser cavity solitons. All of the experimentally observed features and dynamics are reconstructed by using a standard complex Ginzburg-Landau model.
Highlights
We have demonstrated experimentally one-dimensional localized dissipative structures, which have the predicted properties of gain-pinned dissipative solitons
We demonstrate these structures in a GaAs-based vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs) for which (i) the experimental realization is convenient due to nonresonant pumping, above the active material bandgap; (ii) the structure size is limited by the gain profile and is, much smaller than the typical VCSEL solitons7,8,10,12 and comparable to the size of exciton–polariton bright solitons;19,32 and (iii) the onset dynamics, being driven by stimulated laser emission, is an ultra-fast process in the range of single picoseconds, orders of magnitude faster than cavity solitons9,18 and of the same order of magnitude as bright exciton–polariton solitons
The temporal decay of the lasing signal observed in our experiment is due to the pulsed regime of excitation, whereby the gain-pinned dissipative soliton is created in a dynamical “single-shot” regime
Summary
The past decades of research in nonlinear optics have uncovered an immense variety of systems and material configurations that can support optical solitons. In conservative optical systems, temporal or spatial solitons are supported by a nonlinearity compensating for the dispersion or diffraction of light in the propagating geometry. The real-world photonic devices suffer from intrinsic losses, and it is essential to achieve the balance between the dispersion or diffraction and the nonlinearity and in the energy flow, i.e., between the gain and loss in the system, to support self-localized structures. Spatially localized dissipative structures, called cavity solitons, have been successfully created in broad area vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs). In this configuration, the device is kept below the lasing threshold, while the use of an additional external coherent holding laser beam is set up to achieve an optical bistability condition leading to the creation of stable localized modes. Localized dissipative structures, called cavity solitons, have been successfully created in broad area vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs).. Localized dissipative structures, called cavity solitons, have been successfully created in broad area vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs).7 In this configuration, the device is kept below the lasing threshold, while the use of an additional external coherent holding laser beam is set up to achieve an optical bistability condition leading to the creation of stable localized modes. Dissipative modes pinned by a localized gain have been intensively studied theoretically, and their realizations in various systems were proposed.15 These localized structures, known as gainpinned dissipative solitons, have been predicted to be robust and stable over a wide range of parameters even in the absence of Kerr nonlinearity in the material. The gain-pinned solitons form on a timescale of a few picoseconds, which is orders of magnitude faster than the previously reported cavity soliton manipulation dynamics and is comparable to optically injected bright exciton–polariton soliton timescales. We successfully reconstruct all the observed dynamical features by employing a complex Ginzburg–Landau model
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