Soliton-dark pulse pair formation in birefringent cavity fiber lasers through cross phase coupling

Opt Express. 2015 Oct 5;23(20):26252-8. doi: 10.1364/OE.23.026252.

Abstract

We report on the experimental observation of soliton-dark pulse pair formation in a birefringent cavity fiber laser. Temporal cavity solitons are formed in one polarization mode of the cavity. It is observed that associated with each of the cavity solitons a dark pulse is induced on the CW background of the orthogonal polarization mode. We show that the dark pulse formation is a result of the incoherent cross polarization coupling between the soliton and the CW beam and has a mechanism similar to that of the polarization domain formation observed in the fiber lasers.