On-demand harnessing of photonic soliton molecules

Abstract

Soliton molecules (SMs) are fundamentally important modes in nonlinear optical systems. It is a challenge to experimentally produce SMs with a required temporal separation in mode-locked fiber lasers. Here, we propose and realize an experimental scenario for harnessing SM dynamics in a laser setup. In particular, we tailor SMs in a mode-locked laser controlled by second-order group-velocity dispersion and dispersion losses: the real part of dispersion maintains the balance between the dispersion and nonlinearity, while the dispersion loss determines the balance of gain and losses. The experimental results demonstrate that the dispersion loss makes it possible to select desired values of the temporal separation (TS) in bound pairs of SMs in the system. Tunability of the SM's central wavelength and the corresponding hysteresis are addressed too. The demonstrated regime allows us to create multiple SMs with preselected values of the TS and central wavelength, which shows the potential of our setup for the design of optical data-processing schemes.

To be published in Optica

References in corpus (2)

• Beating the channel capacity limit for linear photonic superdense coding
• Resolving the temporal dynamics of mode-locked laser with single-shot time-microscope

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Multidimensional dissipative solitons and solitary vortices
• Soliton-pair dynamical transition in mode-locked lasers
• Two-photon imaging of soliton dynamics
• Strategies for accessing the multi-pulse regime of mode-locked fiber lasers
• Observation of periodic optical spectra and soliton molecules in a novel passively mode-locked fiber laser
• Spatial-spectral mapping to prepare the frequency entangled qudits
• Multipulse Soliton Attractors Facilitated by High-Birefringence Fibers
• Single impurity atom embedded in a dipolar two-soliton molecule as a qubit