Stochasticity, periodicity and coherent structures in partially mode-locked fibre lasers

Abstract

Physical systems with co-existence and interplay of processes featuring distinct spatio-temporal scales are found in various research areas ranging from studies of brain activity to astrophysics. Complexity of such systems makes their theoretical and experimental analysis technically and conceptually challenging. Here, we discover that radiation of partially mode-locked fibre lasers, while being stochastic and intermittent on short time scale, exhibits periodicity and long scale correlations over slow evolution from one round trip to another. The evolution mapping of intensity auto-correlation function allows us to reveal variety of spatio-temporal coherent structures and to experimentally study their symbiotic co-existence with stochastic radiation. Our measurements of interactions of noisy pulses over a time scale of thousands of non-linear lengths demonstrate that they have features of incoherent temporal solitons. Real-time measurements of spatio-temporal intensity dynamics are set to bring new insight into rich underlying nonlinear physics of practical active- and passive-cavity photonic systems.

References in corpus (5)

• Instabilities, breathers and rogue waves in optics
• Ultra-weak long-range interactions of solitons observed over astronomical distances
• The laminar-turbulent transition in a fibre laser
• Topological solitons as addressable phase bits in a driven laser
• Transverse Patterns in Nonlinear Optical Resonators

Cited by in corpus (15)

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• Dynamics of soliton explosions in passively mode-locked fiber lasers
• Unveiling temporal correlations characteristic to phase transition in the intensity of a fibre laser radiation
• Towards Ultrafast Gyroscopes Employing Real-time Intensity and Spectral Domain Measurements of Ultrashort Pulses
• Coherence loss of partially mode-locked fiber laser
• Dark solitons in laser radiation build-up dynamics
• Complete Field Characterization of Ultrashort Pulses in Fiber Photonics
• Persistence and Stochastic Periodicity in the Intensity Dynamics of a Fiber Laser During the Transition to Optical Turbulence
• Programmable photonic time circuits for highly scalable universal unitaries
• State space reconstruction of spatially extended systems and of time delayed systems from the time series of a scalar variable
• Breather molecular complexes in a passively mode-locked fibre laser
• Intelligent breathing soliton generation in ultrafast fibre lasers
• XPM-forced frequency-oscillating soliton in mode-locked fiber laser