No Arabic abstract
A laser is based on the electromagnetic modes of its resonator, which provides the feedback required for oscillation. Enormous progress has been made in controlling the interactions of longitudinal modes in lasers with a single transverse mode. For example, the field of ultrafast science has been built on lasers that lock many longitudinal modes together to form ultrashort light pulses. However, coherent superposition of many longitudinal and transverse modes in a laser has received little attention. The multitude of disparate frequency spacings, strong dispersions, and complex nonlinear interactions among modes greatly favor decoherence over the emergence of order. Here we report the locking of multiple transverse and longitudinal modes in fiber lasers to generate ultrafast spatiotemporal pulses. We construct multimode fiber cavities using graded-index multimode fiber (GRIN MMF). This causes spatial and longitudinal mode dispersions to be comparable. These dispersions are counteracted by strong intracavity spatial and spectral filtering. Under these conditions, we achieve spatiotemporal, or multimode (MM), mode-locking. A variety of other multimode nonlinear dynamical processes can also be observed. Multimode fiber lasers thus open new directions in studies of three-dimensional nonlinear wave propagation. Lasers that generate controllable spatiotemporal fields, with orders-of-magnitude increases in peak power over existing designs, should be possible. These should increase laser utility in many established applications and facilitate new ones.
We introduce a mechanism of stable spatiotemporal soliton formation in a multimode fiber laser. This is based on spatially graded dissipation, leading to distributed Kerr-lens mode-locking. Our analysis involves solutions of a generalized dissipative Gross-Pitaevskii equation. This equation has a broad range of applications in nonlinear physics, including nonlinear optics, spatiotemporal patterns formation, plasma dynamics, and Bose-Einstein condensates. We demonstrate that careful control of dissipative and non-dissipative physical mechanisms results in the self-emergence of stable (2+1)-dimensional dissipative solitons. Achieving such a regime does not require the presence of any additional dissipative nonlinearities, such a mode-locker in a laser, or inelastic scattering in a Bose-Einstein condensate. Our method allows for stable energy (or mass) harvesting by coherent localized structures, such as ultrashort laser pulses or Bose-Einstein condensates.
Mode-locking is a process in which different modes of an optical resonator establish, through nonlinear interactions, stable synchronization. This self-organization underlies light sources that enable many modern scientific applications, such as ultrafast and high-field optics and frequency combs. Despite this, mode-locking has almost exclusively referred to self-organization of light in a single dimension - time. Here we present a theoretical approach, attractor dissection, for understanding three-dimensional (3D) spatiotemporal mode-locking (STML). The key idea is to find, for each distinct type of 3D pulse, a specific, minimal reduced model, and thus to identify the important intracavity effects responsible for its formation and stability. An intuition for the results follows from the minimum loss principle, the idea that a laser strives to find the configuration of intracavity light that minimizes loss (maximizes gain extraction). Through this approach, we identify and explain several distinct forms of STML. These novel phases of coherent laser light have no analogues in 1D and are supported by experimental measurements of the three-dimensional field, revealing STML states comprising more than $10^7$ cavity modes. Our results should facilitate the discovery and understanding of new higher-dimensional forms of coherent light which, in turn, may enable new applications.
We introduce a model for spatiotemporal modelocking in multimode fiber lasers, which is based on the (3+1)-dimensional cubic-quintic complex Ginzburg-Landau equation (cGLE) with conservative and dissipative nonlinearities and a 2-dimensional transverse trapping potential. Systematic numerical analysis reveals a variety of stable nonlinear modes, including stable fundamental solitons and breathers, as well as solitary vortices with winding number $n=1$, while vortices with $n=2$ are unstable, splitting into persistently rotating bound states of two unitary vortices. A characteristic feature of the system is bistability between the fundamental and vortex spatiotemporal solitons.
We develop the scheme of dispersion management (DM) for three-dimensional (3D) solitons in a multimode optical fiber. It is modeled by the parabolic confining potential acting in the transverse plane in combination with the cubic self-focusing. The DM map is adopted in the form of alternating segments with anomalous and normal group-velocity dispersion. Previously, temporal DM solitons were studied in detail in single-mode fibers, and some solutions for 2D spatiotemporal light bullets, stabilized by DM, were found in the model of a planar waveguide. By means of numerical methods, we demonstrate that stability of the 3D spatiotemporal solitons is determined by the usual DM-strength parameter, $S$: they are quasi-stable at $ S<S_{0}approx 0.93$, and completely stable at $S>S_{0}$. Stable vortex solitons are constructed too. We also consider collisions between the 3D solitons, in both axial and transverse directions. The interactions are quasi-elastic, including periodic collisions between solitons which perform shuttle motion in the transverse plane.
A mode locked fibre laser as a source of ultra-stable pulse train has revolutionised a wide range of fundamental and applied research areas by offering high peak powers, high repetition rates, femtosecond range pulse widths and a narrow linewidth. However, further progress in linewidth narrowing seems to be limited by the complexity of the carrier-envelope phase control. Here for the first time we demonstrate experimentally and theoretically a new mechanism of resonance vector self-mode locking where tuning in-cavity birefringence leads to excitation of the longitudinal modes sidebands accompanied by the resonance phase locking of sidebands with the adjacent longitudinal modes. An additional resonance with acoustic phonons provides the repetition rate tunability and linewidth narrowing down to Hz range that drastically reduces the complexity of the carrier-envelope phase control and so will open the way to advance lasers in the context of applications in metrology, spectroscopy, microwave photonics, astronomy, and telecommunications.