We report experimental observation of rains of solitons in figure-of-eight fiber laser passively mode-locked through nonlinear optical loop mirror. Soliton pulses are created from an extended noisy background and drift until they reach a condensed phase comprising several tens of aggregated solitons. The observation of this dynamics tends to strengthen the idea of the universality of the collective behavior of solitons.

We report experimental observation of passive harmonic mode locking (HML) in which the basic pattern is a soliton crystal. Several crystal states were generated from an initial large bound state by increasing the pump power. The soliton crystals are identical and progressively span along the cavity to finally take a regular spacing leading to HML of solitons crystal.

We demonstrate a passive mode-locked Er:Yb doped double-clad fiber laser using a microfiber-based topological insulator (Bi(2)Se(3)) saturable absorber (TISA). By optimizing the cavity loss and output coupling ratio, the mode-locked fiber laser can operate in L-band with high average output power. With the highest pump power of 5 W, 91st harmonic mode locking of soliton bunches with average output power of 308 mW was obtained. This is the first report that the TISA based erbium-doped fiber laser operating above 1.6 μm and is also the highest output power yet reported in TISA based passive mode-locked fiber laser.

It has been shown by numerical simulation that the nonlinear interaction between a laser soliton and an injected monochromatic cw results in their phase locking. As a consequence, the velocity of the soliton begins to depend on the amplitude and frequency of the injected radiation. It has been found that if the frequency of the external signal coincides with the frequency of the dispersive waves emitted by solitons in a laser cavity with lumped intracavity elements, a mechanism for controlling long-range soliton interaction occurs. This mechanism is related to the interference between the injected wave and the dispersive waves involved in the strong long-range interaction between solitons. We have demonstrated the mechanism of soliton-soliton repulsion and, as its consequence, the occurrence of harmonic passive mode locking (multipulse generation with an equidistant arrangement of identical solitons in the laser cavity).

The effect of an external continuous wave (cw) on the operating regime of a passively mode-locked doubleclad fiber laser, operating in the anomalous dispersion regime, is experimentally investigated. Starting from different soliton distributions, we demonstrate that, under specific conditions, the cw signal forces the principal laser to operate in harmonic mode-locking regime. This effect is fully reversible and does not exhibit any hysteresis phenomena.