Hybrid soliton dynamics in liquid-core fibres

Abstract

The discovery of optical solitons being understood as temporally and spectrally stationary optical states has enabled numerous innovations among which, most notably, supercontinuum light sources have become widely used in both fundamental and applied sciences. Here, we report on experimental evidence for dynamics of hybrid solitons—a new type of solitary wave, which emerges as a result of a strong non-instantaneous nonlinear response in CS2-filled liquid-core optical fibres. Octave-spanning supercontinua in the mid-infrared region are observed when pumping the hybrid waveguide with a 460 fs laser (1.95 μm) in the anomalous dispersion regime at nanojoule-level pulse energies. A detailed numerical analysis well correlated with the experiment uncovers clear indicators of emerging hybrid solitons, revealing their impact on the bandwidth, onset energy and noise characteristics of the supercontinua. Our study highlights liquid-core fibres as a promising platform for fundamental optics and applications towards novel coherent and reconfigurable light sources.

High-energy pulse self-compression and ultraviolet generation through soliton dynamics in hollow capillary fibres

“…We have verified, through extensive convergence tests, that no other mode types and symmetries are excited, and that no energy is transferred to any higher order HE 1m modes. In fact minimal energy is transferred to modes higher than HE 11 . What is transferred primarily consists of energy at specific high-order mode phase-matched RDWs (see Fig.…”

Resonance‐Induced Dispersion Tuning for Tailoring Nonsolitonic Radiation via Nanofilms in Exposed Core Fibers

“…Within soliton‐based SCG, dispersion engineering enables controlling both the fission of higher‐order solitons into their fundamental counterparts as well as the associated emission of excess energy to phase‐matched dispersive waves (DWs). [ 6,7 ]…”

Incoherent Shock and Collapse Singularities in Non-Instantaneous Nonlinear Media

“…Besides its fundamental interest, optical fibers and waveguides [29] turn out to be ideal testbeds for the experimental verification of our predictions, thanks to the easily tailorable Raman response function, as well as other recently investigated mechanisms involving liquid or gas-filled photonic crystal fibers (PCF), as well as surface plasmon polariton systems [30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37].…”

“…More generally, we can envisage the experimental observation of the CSCS of incoherent waves owing to the recent progress made on the fabrication of PCF filled with liquids displaying highly non-instantaneous Kerr responses [30,31]. For example, in comparison to standard silica fibers, CS 2 filled PCFs studied in the reference [34] exhibit interesting properties of the response function: The ratio between the instantaneous Kerr effect and the delayed Raman effect is 15:85, and in addition the response time can be as large as 1.5 ps. At the wavelength of 1550 nm, our preliminary numerical simulations indicate that if one injects incoherent pulses with a duration of 20 ps and a peak power of 1 KW, the incoherent shockwaves should be generated and observed after a propagation length of about 0.5 m in this kind of PCFs.…”