Soliton (optics)

Summary

In optics, the term soliton is used to refer to any optical field that does not change during propagation because of a delicate balance between nonlinear and linear effects in the medium. There are two main kinds of solitons:

spatial solitons: the nonlinear effect can balance the diffraction. The electromagnetic field can change the refractive index of the medium while propagating, thus creating a structure similar to a graded-index fiber. If the field is also a propagating mode of the guide it has created, then it will remain confined and it will propagate without changing its shape
temporal solitons: if the electromagnetic field is already spatially confined, it is possible to send pulses that will not change their shape because the nonlinear effects will balance the dispersion. Those solitons were discovered first and they are often simply referred as "solitons" in optics.

Spatial solitons In order to understand how a spatial soliton can exist, we have to make some

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soliton_(optics)

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Observation of Temporal Vector Soliton Propagation and Collision in Birefringent Fiber

Camille Sophie Brès, Xin Chen

We report the experimental observation of temporal vector soliton propagation and collision in a linearly birefringent optical fiber. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is both the first demonstration of temporal vector solitons with two mutually incoherent component fields, and of vector soliton collisions in a Kerr nonlinear medium. Collisions are characterized by an intensity redistribution between the two components, and the experimental results agree with numerical predictions of the coupled nonlinear Schro¨dinger equation.

American Physical Society2007

Collective dynamics in nonlinear resonators coupled in spatial and synthetic dimensions

Tobias Kippenberg, Alexey Tikan, Aleksandr Tusnin

We theoretically investigate chaotic and stable structures in coupled-resonator chains and synthetic frequency dimension influenced by Kerr nonlinearity, thereby bringing insights in the emerging field of soliton generation in chains and lattices of high-Q resonators. (c) 2021 The Author(s)

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Mode Spectrum and Temporal Soliton Formation in Optical Microresonators

Victor Brasch, Tobias Herr, John David Jost, Tobias Kippenberg

The formation of temporal dissipative solitons in optical microresonators enables compact, high-repetition rate sources of ultrashort pulses as well as low noise, broadband optical frequency combs with smooth spectral envelopes. Here we study the influence of the microresonator mode spectrum on temporal soliton formation in a crystalline MgF2 microresonator. While an overall anomalous group velocity dispersion is required, it is found that higher order dispersion can be tolerated as long as it does not dominate the resonator's mode structure. Avoided mode crossings induced by linear mode coupling in the resonator mode spectrum are found to prevent soliton formation when affecting resonator modes close to the pump laser frequency. The experimental observations are in excellent agreement with numerical simulations based on the nonlinear coupled mode equations. The presented results provide for the first time design criteria for the generation of temporal solitons in optical microresonators.

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