Experimental investigation of the extraction of solitons at the initial stage of the soliton formation process

We demonstrate the extraction of a single soliton from a bunch of solitons generated by the pulse breakup effect. The bunch of solitons was generated in a 500-m fiber pumped by 25-ps pulses. For the extraction of single soliton from the bunch we use a nonlinear optical loop mirror (NOLM). At its output we detected a pulse with full width at half-maximum (FWHM) of 0.99 ps whose autocorrelation trace corresponds to that of a soliton. Our results demonstrate that the suggested method can be useful for soliton generation, and also for investigations of the initial stage of the soliton formation process. ©2009 Optical Society of America.

Nonlinear optics; Optical switches; Experimental investigations; Initial stages; Nonlinear optical loop mirror; Pulse break-up; Single soliton; Soliton formation; Soliton generation; Solitons

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