Paths from stationary to chaos in passively mode-locked fiber lasers: research progress of soliton pulsations and soliton explosions

Abstract

Research has shown that passively mode-locked fiber lasers produce chaotic output, which has caught the attention of physicists, chemists, and bio-scientists owing to their wide bandwidth, good random characteristics, and strong anti-interference. In passively mode-locked fiber lasers, soliton pulsations and soliton explosions with period bifurcation characteristics have been demonstrated to be effective paths to chaos as far as 20 years ago. However, due to the lack of real-time spectrum measurement techniques, the earlier research investigated their theoretical aspect. In recent years, the rise of the dispersive Fourier transform technique has activated an upsurge of their experimental research. The present work first discussed the theoretical model of passively mode-locked fiber lasers, the computational analysis method of soliton dynamics, and the related theory of dispersive Fourier transform technique. In addition, we presented and evaluated the progress of the theoretical and experimental research on soliton pulsations as well as on soliton explosions in passively mode-locked fiber lasers. Finally, we proposed the future research directions of the soliton pulsations and soliton explosions that offer great promise for scientific discoveries.

Dissipative soliton breathing dynamics driven by desynchronization of orthogonal polarization states

“…Such orthogonal linear polarized fields of DS with correlated phase relation can be treated as a general phase-coupled oscillator, as shown in Fig. 1(b) 34 , 37 , 40 , 41 . The slow temporal behavior of coupled oscillators strongly depends on syn-/desyn-chronization of orthogonal fields through a phase change.…”

“… – 10 Given the strong connection with the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam recurrence, 32 , 33 i.e., phenomena describing the periodic return of nonlinearly coupled oscillators to their original states, breather solitons, in addition to rogue waves emergence, turbulence, and modulation instability phenomena, have attracted considerable attention in nonlinear optics 6 – 10 , 32 , 33 Also, the breathing solitons are attractive because of their potential for metrology applications by enabling multiscale dual-comb sources for increased measurement resolution 34 . It was recently found that the breathing soliton emergence in anomalous dispersion MLLs can be driven by modulation instability 10 and a simultaneous effect of the soliton bunching and polarization instability 14 .…”

“…A recently developed dispersive Fourier transform technique explores conventional soliton breathing regimes, revealing a range of dynamic vector waveforms with the periods of oscillations from tens to hundreds of round trips under the paradigm of coupled Ginzburg–Landau equations 34 – 36 However, given the limitations of the theoretical and experimental study in the context of the dynamic range of tens of thousands of RTs, the slow evolution of the breathing waveforms up to hundreds of thousands of RTs is still absent 34 – 36 …”

“…[6][7][8][9][10]32,33 Also, the breathing solitons are attractive because of their potential for metrology applications by enabling multiscale dual-comb sources for increased measurement resolution. 34 It was recently found that the breathing soliton emergence in anomalous dispersion MLLs can be driven by modulation instability 10 and a simultaneous effect of the soliton bunching and polarization instability. 14 On the other hand, the breathers in the normal dispersion regime can arise because of Hopf bifurcation 9 and subharmonic entrainment with an integer ratio of the breathing period to the round-trip time.…”

“…7 A recently developed dispersive Fourier transform technique explores conventional soliton breathing regimes, revealing a range of dynamic vector waveforms with the periods of oscillations from tens to hundreds of round trips under the paradigm of coupled Ginzburg-Landau equations. [34][35][36] However, given the limitations of the theoretical and experimental study in the context of the dynamic range of tens of thousands of RTs, the slow evolution of the breathing waveforms up to hundreds of thousands of RTs is still absent. [34][35][36] To fill this lacuna, for the first time, we believe that we have demonstrated a new type of slow soliton breathing dynamics, showing double temporal scale behavior, caused by a vector mechanism allowing the transition from the zero-lag synchronization to phase difference entrainment and finally desynchronization of orthogonal SOPs.…”