The interaction of Kerr nonlinearity with even-orders of dispersion: an infinite hierarchy of solitons

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates experimentally and numerically an infinite hierarchy of optical solitons balancing self-phase modulation with arbitrary negative even-order dispersion, expanding the understanding and control of ultrashort pulses in nonlinear optics.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental evidence for solitons involving pure sextic, octic, and decic dispersion, and numerical evidence for 16th order dispersion solitons, broadening soliton theory.

Findings

Experimental demonstration of solitons with pure $eta_6$, $eta_8$, and $eta_{10}$ dispersion.

Numerical evidence for solitons with pure 16th order dispersion.

Spectral flatness increases with dispersion order, indicating advantages for ultrashort pulses.

Abstract

Temporal solitons are optical pulses that arise from the balance of negative group-velocity dispersion and self-phase modulation. For decades only quadratic dispersion was considered, with higher order dispersion thought of as a nuisance. Following the recent reporting of pure-quartic solitons, we here provide experimental and numerical evidence for an infinite hierarchy of solitons that balance self-phase modulation and arbitrary negative pure, even-order dispersion. Specifically, we experimentally demonstrate the existence of solitons with pure-sextic ($\beta_6$), -octic ($\beta_8$) and -decic ($\beta_{10}$) dispersion, limited only by the performance of our components, and show numerical evidence for the existence of solitons involving pure $16^{\rm th}$ order dispersion. Phase-resolved temporal and spectral characterization reveals that these pulses, exhibit increasing spectral flatness with dispersion order. The measured energy-width scaling laws suggest dramatic advantages for ultrashort pulses. These results broaden the fundamental understanding of solitons and present new avenues to engineer ultrafast pulses in nonlinear optics and its applications.