Soliton dynamics in the multiphoton plasma regime

Abstract

Solitary waves have consistently captured the imagination of scientists, ranging from fundamental breakthroughs in spectroscopy and metrology enabled by supercontinuum light, to gap solitons for dispersionless slow-light, and discrete spatial solitons in lattices, amongst others. Recent progress in strong-field atomic physics include impressive demonstrations of attosecond pulses and high-harmonic generation via photoionization of free-electrons in gases at extreme intensities of 1014 Wcm2. Here we report the first phase-resolved observations of femtosecond optical solitons in a semiconductor microchip, with multiphoton ionization at picojoule energies and 1010 Wcm2 intensities. The dramatic nonlinearity leads to picojoule observations of free-electron-induced blue-shift at 1016 cm3 carrier densities and self-chirped femtosecond soliton acceleration. Furthermore, we evidence the time-gated dynamics of soliton splitting on-chip, and the suppression of soliton recurrence due to fast free-electron dynamics. These observations in the highly dispersive slow-light media reveal a rich set of physics governing ultralow-power nonlinear photon-plasma dynamics.

14 pages (main body and supplement), 11 figures - earlier draft; http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130122/srep01100/full/srep01100.html

References in corpus (5)

• Mid-infrared optical parametric amplifier using silicon nanophotonic waveguides
• Phase-sensitive optical pulse characterization on a chip via Spectral Phase Interferometry for Direct Electric-Field Reconstruction (SPIDER)
• Observation of soliton pulse compression in photonic crystal waveguides
• Demonstration of temporal cloaking
• Non-trivial scaling of self-phase modulation and three-photon absorption in III-V photonic crystal waveguides

Cited by in corpus (13)

• Mode-locked ultrashort pulse generation from on-chip normal dispersion microresonators
• Observation and analysis of creation, decay, and regeneration of annular soliton clusters in a lossy cubic-quintic optical medium
• Ultrafast nonlinear pulse propagation dynamics in metal-dielectric periodic photonic architectures
• Generation and characterization of frequency tuneable sub-15 fs pulses in a gas-filled hollow-core fiber pumped by a Yb:KGW laser
• Self-frequency blue-shift of dissipative solitons in silicon based waveguides
• Accelerating Solitons in Gas-Filled Hollow-Core Photonic Crystal Fibers
• Robust transmission stabilization and dynamic switching in broadband hybrid waveguide systems with nonlinear gain and loss
• Frequency shifting for solitons based on transformations on the Fourier domain and applications
• Many-body interaction in fast soliton collisions
• Collision-induced amplitude dynamics of fast 2D solitons in saturable nonlinear media with weak nonlinear loss
• Highly controllable stabilization and switching of multiple colliding soliton sequences with generic Ginzburg-Landau gain-loss
• Collision-induced amplitude dynamics of pulses in linear waveguides with the generic nonlinear loss
• Free-carrier driven spatio-temporal dynamics in amplifying silicon waveguides