Abstract

Conventional optical solitons are remarkably stable pulses that arise from the balance of the nonlinearity and the anomalous quadratic dispersion in the medium in which they propagate, such as optical fibres [1] or silicon chips [2]. Due to their self-reinforced stability, they are ideal candidates to generate transform-limited pulses from simple laser architectures [3]. However, generating ultrashort high-energy pulses from soliton lasers is difficult, due to the spectral sideband generation of periodically perturbed solitons [4], which limits the shortest width, and the soliton energy scaling, which limits the energy at a given width. Consequently, laser architectures had to become more complex, with additional recompressing stages [5]. Here, by means of experimental measurements, nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NLSE) simulations, and analytical developments, we show that the recently discovered pure-quartic solitons (PQS) [6] have the potential to outperform conventional solitons in yielding high-energy ultrashort pulses and bring soliton lasers back to the forefront of ultrafast laser research.

© 2017 IEEE