Soliton fibre lasers mode-locked at a high harmonic of their round-trip frequency have many potential applications, from telecommunications to data storage(1). Control of multiple pulses in passively mode-locked fibre lasers has, however, proved very difficult to achieve. This has recently changed with the advent of fibre lasers mode-locked by intense optomechanical interactions in a short length of photonic crystal fibre(2,3). Optomechanical coupling between cavity modes gives rise to highly stable, optomechanically bound, laser soliton states. The repetition rate of these states corresponds to the mechanical resonant frequency in the photonic crystal fibre core(4), which can be a few gigahertz. Here we show that this system can be successfully used for programmable generation and storage of gigahertz-rate soliton sequences over many hours

Self-assembly of fundamental elements through weak, long-range interactions plays a central role in both supramolecular DNA assembly and bottom-up synthesis of nanostructures. Optical solitons, analogous in many ways to particles, arise from the balance between nonlinearity and dispersion and have been studied in numerous optical systems. Although both short- and long-range interactions between optical solitons have attracted extensive interest for decades, stable soliton supramolecules, with multiple aspects of complexity and flexibility, have thus far escaped experimental observation due to the absence of techniques for enhancing and controlling the long-range inter-soliton forces. Here we report that long-range soliton interactions originating from optoacoustic effects and dispersive-wave radiations can be precisely tailored in a fibre laser cavity, enabling self-assembly of large numbers of optical solitons into highly-ordered supramolecular structures. We demonstrate several features of such optical structures, highlighting their potential applications in optical information storage and ultrafast laser-field manipulation.

Ultrafast lasers with high repetition rates are of considerable interest in applications such as optical fiber telecommunications, frequency metrology, high-speed optical sampling, and arbitrary waveform generation. For fiber lasers mode-locked at the cavity round-trip frequency, the pulse repetition rate is limited to tens or hundreds of megahertz by the meter-order cavity lengths. Here we report a soliton fiber laser passively mode-locked at a high harmonic (similar to 2 GHz) of its fundamental frequency by means of optoacoustic interactions in the small solid glass core of a short length ( 60 cm) of photonic crystal fiber. Due to tight confinement of both light and vibrations, the optomechanical interaction is strongly enhanced. The long-lived acoustic vibration provides strong modulation of the refractive index in the photonic crystal fiber core, fixing the soliton spacing in the laser cavity and allowing stable mode-locking, with low pulse timing jitter, at gigahertz repetition rates. (C) 2015 Optical Society of Americ