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Metafibers expand the functionalities of conventional optical fibres to unprecedented nanoscale light manipulations by integrating metasurfaces on the fibre tips, becoming an emerging light-coupling platform for both the nanoscience and fibre optics communities. Current metafibers remain proof-of-concept demonstrations that mostly explore isolated bare fibres owing to the lack of standard interfaces with universal fibre networks. Here, we develop methodologies for fabricating well-defined plasmonic metasurfaces directly on the end facets of commercial single -mode fibre jumpers using standard planar technologies and provide the first demonstration of their practical applications in the nonlinear plasmonic regime. Featuring plug-and-play connections with fibre circuitry and arbitrary metasurface landscapes, the metafibers with tunable plasmonic resonances are implemented into fibre laser cavities, yielding all-fibre sub-picosecond (minimum 513 fs) soliton mode locked lasers at optical wavelengths of 1.5 μm and 2 μm, demonstrating their unusual polarimetric nonlinear transfer functions and superior saturation absorption responses. The nanofabrication process flow is compatible with existing cleanroom technologies, offering metafibers an avenue to become a regular member of functionalised fibre components. This work paves the way toward the next generation of ultrafast lasers, optical frequency combs, and ultracompact ‘all-in-fibre’ optical systems.

We demonstrate an ultralow-noise microrod-resonator based laser that oscillates on the gain supplied by the stimulated Brillouin scattering optical nonlinearity. Microresonator Brillouin lasers are known to offer an outstanding frequency noise floor, which is limited by fundamental thermal fluctuations. Here, we show experimental evidence that thermal effects also dominate the close-to-carrier frequency fluctuations. The 6 mm diameter microrod resonator used in our experiments has a large optical mode area of ∼100 μ m ^2 , and hence its 10 ms thermal time constant filters the close-to-carrier optical frequency noise. The result is an absolute laser linewidth of 240 Hz with a corresponding white-frequency noise floor of 0.1 Hz ^2 Hz ^−1 . We explain the steady-state performance of this laser by measurements of its operation state and of its mode detuning and lineshape. Our results highlight a mechanism for noise that is common to many microresonator devices due to the inherent coupling between intracavity power and mode frequency. We demonstrate the ability to reduce this noise through a feedback loop that stabilizes the intracavity power.

We investigate the formation of cavity solitons in crystalline whispering-gallery-mode disk resonators that are pumped in different dispersion regimes. In the Fourier domain, these dissipative structures correspond to specific types of mode-locked Kerr optical frequency combs. Depending on the sign of the second-order chromatic dispersion and on the pumping conditions, we show that either bright or dark cavity solitons can emerge, and we show that these two regimes are associated with characteristic spectral signatures that can be discriminated experimentally. We use the Lugiato-Lefever spatiotemporal formalism to investigate the temporal dynamics leading to the formation of these azimuthal solitons, as well as the emergence of Turing patterns. The theoretical results are in excellent agreement with experimental measurements that are obtained using calcium and magnesium fluoride disk resonators pumped near 1550 nm.

Abstract Ultrafast fiber lasers constitute a flexible platform to investigate new solitary wave concepts. To surpass the low energy limitation of the conventional solitons generated in standard telecom fibers, successive breakthroughs have promoted the usage of an important frequency chirping within fiber oscillators. This lead to original solitary wave regimes such as stretched-pulse, all-normal-dispersion, and self-similar dynamics. We here revisit ultrafast fiber lasers built from standard optical fibers featuring solely anomalous dispersion. We propose a new cavity design enhancing key dissipative effects with contained frequency chirping and demonstrate the generation of high energy pulses in the few-picoseconds regime. The involved intracavity dynamics blends conventional and dissipative soliton features in an unseen way with low- and high-energy propagation regions, allowing an increased flexibility and novel scalability prospects.

The self-formation of incoherent laser pulses appears paradoxical, involving both a strong instability and a temporal localization process. Incoherent pulse regimes are nevertheless recurrent within ultrafast fiber laser dynamics. In this paper, we bring decisive experimental data, by recording in real time the buildup dynamics of incoherent pulses under different cavity dispersion regimes. Our measurements highlight different dominant mechanisms at play. Whereas soliton pulse shaping contributes to creating a chaotic bunch of pulses in the anomalous dispersion regime, incoherent pulses in the normal dispersion regime follow strongly turbulent dissipative dynamics. Numerical simulations reproduce qualitatively well the final buildup stage of observed dynamics. By displaying common dynamical features as well as disparities, these results support the development of a general concept of incoherent dissipative solitons.