Mulitiscale spatiotemporal structures in mode-locked fiber lasers

Abstract

Using an Er-doped fiber laser as a test bed, here we for the first time experimentally demonstrate the simultaneous effect of the fast scale (round-trip time) and slow scale (thousands round-trip time) instabilities on the emergence of breathers similar to the Akhmediev breathers, Peregrine solitons, and partially mode-locked chaotic solitons. The anomalous statistics of the laser output power justifies the connection of the observed spatiotemporal structures with bright and dark rogue waves. Apart from the interest in laser physics for revealing mechanisms of the multiscale dynamics, the obtained results can be of fundamental interest for studying spatiotemporal patterns induced by the interplay of the mechanisms mentioned above in various distributed systems.