Unveiling the complexity of spatiotemporal soliton molecules in real time

作者:Guo, Yuankai; Lin, Wei; Wang, Wenlong; Zhang, Runsen; Liu, Tao; Xu, Yiqing; Wei, Xiaoming*; Yang, Zhongmin*
来源:Nature Communications, 2023, 14(1): 2029.
DOI:10.1038/s41467-023-37711-6

摘要

Observing the dynamics of 3D soliton molecules can hold great opportunities for unveiling the mechanism of molecular complexity and other nonlinear problems. In spite of this fantastic potential, real-time visualization of their dynamics occurring on femtosecond-to-picosecond time scales is still challenging, particularly when high-spatiotemporal-resolution and long-term observation are required. In this work, we observe the real-time speckle-resolved spectral-temporal dynamics of 3D soliton molecules for a long time interval using multispeckle spectral-temporal measurement technology. Diverse real-time dynamics of 3D soliton molecules are captured for the first time, including the speckle-resolved birth, spatiotemporal interaction, and internal vibration of 3D soliton molecules. Further studies show that nonlinear spatiotemporal coupling associated with a large average-chirp gradient over the speckled mode profile plays a significant role in these dynamics. These efforts may shed new light on decomposing the complexity of 3D soliton molecules, and create an analogy between 3D soliton molecules and chemical molecules. @@@ The authors present the real-time spectral-temporal dynamics of 3D soliton molecules, highlighting the importance of nonlinear spatiotemporal coupling in the dynamics of spatiotemporal mode-locking.