Abstract

Temporal optical solitons have been the subject of intense research during the last decades due to their intriguing physics and breakthrough applications in ultrafast optics and supercontinuum generation. Bright optical solitons studied to date result from the interaction of anomalous group velocity dispersion (GVD) (β₂ <0) and self phase modulation (SPM) [1]. Here we unveil an entirely new class of solitons arising purely from the interaction of anomalous fourth order dispersion (FOD) (β₄<0) and SPM, which can occur for β₂ >0. We provide evidence of shape-preserving propagation and flat temporal phase for the fundamental pure-quartic soliton and recurrent propagation and temporal compression for the higher-order pure-quartic solitons. We use the name of pure-quartic solitons to distinguish this finding from the field of quartic solitons [2], i.e. conventional solitons distorted by the presence of FOD. This discovery was enabled by the unique dispersion properties of photonic crystal waveguides (PhC-wgs), which provide access to very large β₄ values in the normal GVD regime.

© 2015 IEEE