Extraction of a single soliton from a bunch of solitons generated by pulse breakup

摘要

Pulses propagating in the fiber with anomalous dispersion are broken up to the bunch of soliton. The extraction of an individual soliton from the bunch can be used for soliton generation and also for investigation of the process of the soliton formation. In this work we experimentally demonstrate that the NOLM allows extraction of an individual soliton. Earlier we have shown numerically that the NOLM has high transmission for the solitons with a range of durations while solitons with shorter and longer durations are rejected. The range of the durations with high transmission depends on the NOLM length and also can be moved by amplification of solitons before entering to the NOLM. In the experiment we launched 25-ps pulses with about 10 W of power to the 500-m single mode fiber with dispersion equal to 20 ps/nm-km. As a result of the pulse breakup, a bunch of solitons is formed at the fiber output. The resulting solitons are launched to the EDFA and then to the NOLM made from the 40-m of the same fiber. The NOLM parameters are adjusted to transmit the highest soliton in the bunch (about 50 W of power and I ps of duration according to theoretical estimations). In the experiment we detected at the NOLM output a single pulse with duration of 1.46 ps and autocorrelation function similar to that of the soliton. When a 1-km fiber was attached to the NOLM at the fiber output we detected a soliton with duration of 0.9 ps.