Soliton collision induced explosions in a mode-locked fibre laser

Junsong Peng,Heping Zeng

doi:10.1038/s42005-019-0134-8

Abstract

Soliton explosion refers to a striking nonlinear dynamics in dissipative systems. In this state, a dissipative soliton collapses but returns back to its original state afterwards. Yet, the origin of such exotic soliton dynamics remains elusive. Here it is revealed that soliton collision can induce soliton explosions in a mode-locked fibre laser, benefiting from synchronous measurements of the spatio-temporal intensity evolution and the real-time spectra evolution using dispersive Fourier transform. Up to seven nonlinear regimes are observed successively in the laser by increasing the pump power only, including single-pulse mode locking, standard soliton explosions, noise-like mode locking, stable double pulsing, soliton collision induced explosions, soliton molecules, and double-pulse noise-like mode locking. These experimental findings are conducive to understand complex soliton dynamics in many nonlinear dissipative systems.

Highlights

Soliton explosion refers to a striking nonlinear dynamics in dissipative systems
We experimentally study explosions of dissipative solitons in a mode-locked fibre laser, and demonstrate a conceptually different type of soliton explosions induced by soliton collision
The pump power is changed by only 2 mW from Fig. 2c to Fig. 2e, demonstrating that the dynamics of soliton explosions are very sensitive to the pump power

Summary

Introduction

Soliton explosion refers to a striking nonlinear dynamics in dissipative systems. In this state, a dissipative soliton collapses but returns back to its original state afterwards. It is revealed that soliton collision can induce soliton explosions in a mode-locked fibre laser, benefiting from synchronous measurements of the spatio-temporal intensity evolution and the real-time spectra evolution using dispersive Fourier transform. Up to seven nonlinear regimes are observed successively in the laser by increasing the pump power only, including single-pulse mode locking, standard soliton explosions, noise-like mode locking, stable double pulsing, soliton collision induced explosions, soliton molecules, and double-pulse noise-like mode locking These experimental findings are conducive to understand complex soliton dynamics in many nonlinear dissipative systems. With the help of a novel powerful real-time spectra measurement technique called dispersive Fourier transformation (DFT)[7,8], soliton explosions were found experimentally in a mode-locked fibre laser 9. Soliton collisions were widely investigated in laser optics[25,26,27,28], soliton explosions have not been found in these investigations

Methods

Results

Conclusion