Hybrid soliton dynamics in liquid-core fibres

• Published in: Nature communications Vol. 8; no. 1; p. 42
• Main Authors: Chemnitz, Mario, Gebhardt, Martin, Gaida, Christian, Stutzki, Fabian, Kobelke, Jens, Limpert, Jens, Tünnermann, Andreas, Schmidt, Markus A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 29.06.2017; Nature Portfolio
• Subjects: 639/624/1111/1117; 639/624/400/1119; 639/766/400/1118; Humanities and Social Sciences; multidisciplinary; Science; Science (multidisciplinary)
• ISSN: 2041-1723; 2041-1723
• DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-00033-5

The discovery of optical solitons being understood as temporally and spectrally stationary optical states has enabled numerous innovations among which, most notably, supercontinuum light sources have become widely used in both fundamental and applied sciences. Here, we report on experimental evidence for dynamics of hybrid solitons—a new type of solitary wave, which emerges as a result of a strong non-instantaneous nonlinear response in CS 2 -filled liquid-core optical fibres. Octave-spanning supercontinua in the mid-infrared region are observed when pumping the hybrid waveguide with a 460 fs laser (1.95 μm) in the anomalous dispersion regime at nanojoule-level pulse energies. A detailed numerical analysis well correlated with the experiment uncovers clear indicators of emerging hybrid solitons, revealing their impact on the bandwidth, onset energy and noise characteristics of the supercontinua. Our study highlights liquid-core fibres as a promising platform for fundamental optics and applications towards novel coherent and reconfigurable light sources. Here, Chemnitz et al. report experimental evidence for hybrid solitons – a type of solitary wave, which emerges as a result of a strong non-instantaneous nonlinear response in CS 2 -filled liquid-core optical fibres, demonstrating efficient soliton-driven supercontinuum generation.