Abstract

Ultrafast fiber lasers capable of generating ultrashort pulses play important roles in many aspects of our life for their various applications in fields ranging from fundamental sciences to industrial purposes. Taking advantage of passive mode-locking techniques, the ultrashort pulses can be easily obtained from the fiber lasers. In addition to being an ultrashort pulse sources for practical applications, the passively mode-locked fiber lasers are also actually the nonlinear optical systems which provide good platforms for investigating various soliton dynamics and nonlinear phenomena. Indeed, by tuning the laser cavity parameters such and fiber nonlinearity, birefringence and dispersion, versatile soliton nonlinear phenomena and dynamics could be observed in ultrafast fiber lasers, such as dissipative soliton resonance, self-similar solitons, vector solitons, and multi-soliton patterns. The above-mentioned soliton nonlinear phenomena are stable or quasi-stable ones in fiber lasers. However, there are still many non-stationary soliton dynamics, or we can call them soliton transient dynamics, to be investigated. Due to detection speed and the response bandwidth of the conventional measurement equipment such as optical spectrum analyzer and autocorrelator, the soliton transient dynamics were rarely investigated. In this talk, we will review our recent results on the investigations of the soliton transient dynamics in the ultrafast fiber lasers based on the dispersive Fourier transform (also called as time-stretch method), i.e., the buildup dynamics of dissipative soliton and conventional soliton, soliton explosions, rogue wave generation, real-time spectral features of vector soliton. Our findings may be useful for further understanding the soliton dynamics, and also indicate that the ultrafast fiber lasers are indeed good platforms for observing various soliton nonlinear phenomena.

© 2018 The Author(s)