Soliton Distillation in Fiber Lasers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method to extract pure solitons from a fiber laser by using nonlinear Fourier transform to distinguish and filter out the continuous wave background, enabling clearer soliton generation.

Contribution

The paper presents the first demonstration of soliton distillation from a resonant CW background in fiber lasers using NFT-based filtering, a new approach in soliton control.

Findings

NFT can distinguish solitons from CW background in nonlinear frequency domain.

Filtering eigenvalues yields pure solitons via inverse NFT.

Simulation confirms effectiveness of the soliton distillation method.

Abstract

Pure solitons are for the first time distilled from the resonant continuous wave (CW) background in a fiber laser by utilizing nonlinear Fourier transform (NFT). It is identified that the soliton and the resonant CW background have different eigenvalue distributions in the nonlinear frequency domain. Similar to water distillation, we propose the approach of soliton distillation, by making NFT on a steady pulse generated from a fiber laser, then filtering out the eigenvalues of the resonant CW background in the nonlinear frequency domain, and finally recovering the soliton by inverse NFT (INFT). Simulation results verify that the soliton can be distinguished from the resonant CW background in the nonlinear frequency domain and pure solitons can be obtained by INFT.