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The pure-quartic soliton laser

Nature Photonics volume 14, pages 492–497 (2020)Cite this article

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Abstract

Ultrashort pulse generation hinges on the careful management of dispersion. Traditionally, this has exclusively involved second-order dispersion, with higher-order dispersion treated as a nuisance to be minimized. Here, we show that this higher-order dispersion can be strategically leveraged to access an uncharted regime of ultrafast laser operation. In particular, our mode-locked laser—with an intracavity spectral pulse shaper—emits pure-quartic soliton pulses that arise from the interaction of fourth-order dispersion and the Kerr nonlinearity. Phase-resolved measurements demonstrate that their pulse energy scales with the third power of the inverse pulse duration. This implies a strong increase in the energy of short pure-quartic solitons compared with conventional solitons, for which the energy scales as the inverse of the pulse duration. These results not only demonstrate a novel approach to ultrafast lasers, but more fundamentally, they clarify the use of higher-order dispersion for optical pulse control, enabling innovations in nonlinear optics and its applications.

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Fig. 1: The principle of operation of the PQS laser.
Fig. 2: Conventional soliton and PQS regimes.
Fig. 3: Sideband analysis.
Fig. 4: Measured energy-width scaling properties of the emitted PQS pulses for different values of applied quartic dispersion.

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Data availability

The data that support the plots in this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project (grant no. DP180102234), the University of Sydney Professor Harry Messel Research Fellowship and the Asian Office of Aerospace R&D (AOARD) (grant no. FA2386-19-1-4067).

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Author notes

  1. Darren D. Hudson

    Present address: CACI Photonics Solutions, Florham Park, NJ, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Photonics and Optical Science (IPOS), School of Physics, The University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Antoine F. J. Runge, Kevin K. K. Tam & C. Martijn de Sterke

  2. MQ Photonics, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Darren D. Hudson

  3. The University of Sydney Nano Institute (Sydney Nano), The University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    C. Martijn de Sterke

  4. Nokia Bell Labs, Holmdel, NJ, USA

    Andrea Blanco-Redondo

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  4. C. Martijn de Sterke
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  5. Andrea Blanco-Redondo
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Contributions

A.B.-R., C.M.d.S. and D.D.H. conceived the idea of the PQS laser. A.F.J.R., D.D.H. and A.B.-R. designed the experiment. A.F.J.R. performed the experiments and the numerical simulations. K.K.K.T. and C.M.d.S. carried out the theoretical analysis. C.M.d.S. and A.B.-R. supervised the overall project. All the authors contributed to the interpretation of data and wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Antoine F. J. Runge.

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Competing interests

A.F.J.R., D.D.H., C.M.d.S. and A.B.-R. have submitted a provisional patent application based on the ideas presented in this work.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–6, Discussion and Table 1.

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Runge, A.F.J., Hudson, D.D., Tam, K.K.K. et al. The pure-quartic soliton laser. Nat. Photonics 14, 492–497 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-020-0629-6

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