Polarization dynamics of ultrafast solitons

Abstract

We study the polarization dynamics of ultrafast solitons in mode-locked fiber lasers. We find that when a stable soliton is generated, it's state-of-polarization shifts toward a stable state and when the soliton is generated with excess power levels it experiences relaxation oscillations in its intensity and timing. On the other hand, when a soliton is generated in an unstable state-of-polarization, it either decays in intensity until it disappears, or its temporal width decreases until it explodes into several solitons and then it disappears. We also found that when two solitons are simultaneously generated close to each other, they attract each other until they collide and merge into a single soliton. Although, these two solitons are generated with different states-of-polarization, they shift their state-of-polarization closer to each other until the polarization coincides when they collide. We support our findings by numerical calculations of a non-Lagrangian approach by simulating the Ginzburg-Landau equation governing the dynamics of solitons in a laser cavity. Our model also predicts the relaxation oscillations of stable solitons and the two types of unstable solitons observed in the experimental measurements.

arXiv comment10 pages, 6 figures, submitted to Opt. Exp

References in corpus (8)

• Real-time observation of dissipative optical soliton molecular motions
• The mode-locking transition of random lasers
• Breather soliton dynamics in microresonators
• Imaging soliton dynamics in optical microcavities
• Nonlinear Polarization Evolution of ultrashort pulses in Polarization Maintaining fibers
• Stationary and oscillatory bound states of dissipative solitons created by the third-order dispersion
• Behavioral similarity of dissipative solitons in an ultrafast fiber laser
• Variational approach for walking solitons in birefringent fibres