Bunching of temporal cavity solitons via forward Brillouin scattering

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates experimentally and theoretically that forward Brillouin scattering causes temporal cavity solitons in a fiber resonator to self-organize into regularly spaced groups, revealing new insights into light-sound interactions.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental observation of soliton bunching due to forward Brillouin scattering and develops a theoretical model that matches the experimental results.

Findings

Solitons self-organize into regularly spaced bunches

Theoretical model agrees with experimental observations

Sound interacts with ultrafast light pulses to induce organization

Abstract

We report on the experimental observation of bunching dynamics with temporal cavity solitons in a continuously-driven passive fibre resonator. Specifically, we excite a large number of ultrafast cavity solitons with random temporal separations, and observe in real time how the initially random sequence self-organizes into regularly-spaced aggregates. To explain our experimental observations, we develop a simple theoretical model that allows long-range acoustically-induced interactions between a large number of temporal cavity solitons to be simulated. Significantly, results from our simulations are in excellent agreement with our experimental observations, strongly suggesting that the soliton bunching dynamics arise from forward Brillouin scattering. In addition to confirming prior theoretical analyses and unveiling a new cavity soliton self-organization phenomenon, our findings elucidate the manner in which sound interacts with large ensembles of ultrafast pulses of light.