Highly-Multimode Solitons in Step-Index Optical Fiber

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the generation of multimode solitons in step-index fibers, composed of multiple aligned transverse modes with complex spatio-spectral features, potentially enabling advanced nonlinear optical applications.

Contribution

It reports the first observation of multimode solitons in step-index fibers, detailing their structure, properties, and potential for future research and applications.

Findings

Multimode solitons consist of 5-10 temporally-aligned modes.

They exhibit speckled beam profiles and complex spatio-spectral variations.

Peak powers can exceed 300 kW with durations around 100 fs.

Abstract

We report the generation of multimode solitons in step-index fiber. The solitons are superpositions of 5-10 temporally-aligned transverse modes, they exhibit speckled beam profiles, and the spatio-spectral variation across the soliton can be complex. Greater understanding of multimode solitons should create a foundation for further research into complex multimode nonlinear phenomena in step-index fibers. With energies of tens of nanojoules and durations around 100 fs, the multimode solitons are speckled fields with peak powers that can exceeed 300 kW, parameters which may be valuable in applications.