ARTICLES

PUBLISHED ONLINE: 23 MAY 2010 | DOI: 10.1038/NPHOTON.2010.120

Temporal cavity solitons in one-dimensional Kerr

media as bits in an all-optical buffer
François Leo1 *, Stéphane Coen2, Pascal Kockaert1, Simon-Pierre Gorza1, Philippe Emplit1
and Marc Haelterman1

Temporal cavity solitons are packets of light persisting in a continuously driven nonlinear resonator. They are robust
attracting states, readily excited through a phase-insensitive and wavelength-insensitive process. As such, they constitute
an ideal support for bits in an optical buffer that would seamlessly combine three critical telecommunication functions,
namely all-optical storage, all-optical reshaping and wavelength conversion. Here, with standard silica optical fibres, we
report the first experimental observation of temporal cavity solitons. The cavity solitons are 4 ps long and are used to
demonstrate storage of a data stream for more than a second. We also observe interactions of close cavity solitons,
revealing for our set-up a potential capacity of up to 45,000 bits at 25 Gbit s21. More fundamentally, cavity solitons are
localized dissipative structures. Therefore, given that silica exhibits a pure instantaneous Kerr nonlinearity, our experiment
constitutes one of the simplest examples of self-organization phenomena in nonlinear optics.

T
emporal cavity solitons (CSs) are pulses of light going round
and round indefinitely in a driven nonlinear optical cavity1.
Being solitons, they do not spread. Chromatic dispersion is
balanced by nonlinearity2. As ‘cavity’ solitons, they do not dissipate.
Losses are balanced by an external continuous-wave (c.w.) coherent
driving3–5. This double balancing act completely sets the soliton par-
ameters, making them unique6. They are also robust attracting
states. Any suitable addressing pulse will write a persistent soliton
in the cavity. Providing they are not too close to one another, they
do not interact either1,7. Any incoming binary-coded data stream
can thus be captured and stored indefinitely as a sequence of tem-
poral CSs, realizing an all-optical buffer1,8. Because the stored data
stream is sustained without an amplifier, it does not accumulate
noise as it continues to circle the cavity. Rather, noise present
on the input data is dissipated by the cavity: the uniqueness of the
CS state provides a robust all-optical reshaping mechanism.
Clearly, temporal CSs are natural candidates for bits in an optical
memory and in all-optical processing systems. However, they
remain virtually unstudied experimentally. Mitschke and Schwache
reported indirect observations of temporal soliton ensembles, but
not of isolated CSs9. Frequency combs in Kerr microresonators
may be a signature of temporal CSs10. In contrast, we report here
the first direct experimental observation of these objects.
CSs have been intensely studied theoretically since the early
1990s, predominantly in the field of two-dimensional transverse
nonlinear optics3–5,7,8,11–14. The term ‘cavity soliton’ was introduced
in these studies for the subset of dissipative solitons6 found in coher-
ently driven optical cavities3,5. Here, we extend this terminology to
the temporal case. Note that this excludes solitons in lasers and
other incoherently driven cavities15,16 (see also ref. 6). Three-dimen-
sional CSs also exist and are known as cavity light bullets17,18. In the
spatial context, CSs are c.w. light beams of planar resonators and
nonlinearity balances diffraction rather than chromatic dispersion.
Those spatial CSs have been observed using semiconductor micro-
cavities19. The experiment confirmed that two-dimensional spatial
CSs are independently addressable and can be moved in the trans-
verse plane of the driving beam, realizing the prospect of an optical
array processor with spatial CSs as independent pixels. Spatial CSs,
however, place stringent demands on the transverse uniformity of
the cavity, posing serious technological challenges. Material impuri-
ties act as trapping sites, restricting the positioning freedom of CSs,
whereas any transverse gradients lead to drifts15,19,20. Temporal CSs,
albeit limited to being unidimensional, are intrinsically immune to
these issues.
Our experiments are based on a passive ring cavity made of stan-
dard optical fibres and rely on the instantaneous pure Kerr non-
linearity of silica2. Remarkably, the Kerr cavity dynamics has been
shown to be governed by a mean-field model21,22 that is analogous
to reaction-diffusion equations encountered in chemistry and devel-
opmental biology6,23, and more generally in nonlinear dissipative
chemical systems. CSs are therefore a class of dissipative structures
(DSs) akin to those first introduced by Prigogine’s school24,25. In
this sense, the Kerr cavity appears as the simplest optical system
that demonstrates the universality of self-organization phenomena
in nonlinear optics. For that reason, it has been dubbed the ‘hydro-
gen atom’ of nonlinear cavities3, which highlights the fundamental
character of our observations. Consequently, we must stress that
our work not only constitutes the first experimental observation
of temporal CSs, but also of Kerr CSs.
Results
CSs often arise under conditions of coexistence, for the same value
of parameters, of two stable stationary states, respectively a c.w. (or
homogeneous) state and a modulated (or patterned) state13,14,19,26–28.
In such a case, it is possible for the intracavity field to be homo-
geneous in one region and modulated in another. These type of
intermediate solutions are localized DSs, and a CS is a localized
DS with a single peak. The passive Kerr cavity is well known to
exhibit bistability of the homogeneous state29,30. Moreover, when
the Kerr medium (considered here to be self-focusing as in our
experiment) exhibits anomalous dispersion, the upper branch of
the bistable cycle is unstable in favour of modulated solutions21,31,32
through a Turing bifurcation33,34. This branch of modulated sol-
utions is stable and coexists with the homogeneous lower-branch

1
Service OPERA-photonique, Université libre de Bruxelles (U.L.B.), 50 Avenue F. D. Roosevelt, CP 194/5, B-1050 Bruxelles, Belgium, 2 Department of Physics,
The University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand. * e-mail: francois.leo@ulb.ac.be

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ARTICLES
Addressing
beam
AOM
WDM
Polarization
controller Fibre coupler Output port
90/10
Fibre
90 m WDM
cavity
290 m
Optical
Piezo-electric
isolator
fibre stretcher
Controller
Figure 1 | Experimental set-up. A passive fibre cavity is externally driven by a c.w. laser beam. CSs are excited with 4-ps addressing pulses at a different
wavelength. Only a single addressing pulse, selected by an acousto-optic modulator (AOM), is needed to write a CS. The driving and addressing beams are
combined through a wavelength division multiplexer (WDM) after amplification with erbium-doped fibre amplifiers (EDFA). Part of the output beam is used
to actively stabilize the cavity length, while the rest is directed towards an oscilloscope and an optical spectrum analyser. Bandpass filters (BPF) improve the
signal-to-noise ratio of the measurements.
solutions in a suitable range of driving powers. This allows for the
existence of CSs in the Kerr cavity. Although CSs can arise in con-
ditions more general than described here35, this is the regime in
which we ran our experiment.
Our experimental set-up is depicted in Fig. 1. The passive cavity
is entirely made up of about 380 m of standard single-mode silica
optical fibre laid in a ring configuration and closed on itself by a
90/10 fibre coupler. The round-trip time is 1.85 ms. The coupler
is arranged so that 90% of the intracavity power is recirculated,
which leads to a large effective nonlinearity. The cavity incorporates
an optical fibre isolator to prevent the build-up of stimulated
Brillouin scattering radiation, which would otherwise deplete the
driving beam2,32, a piezo-electric fibre stretcher for active stabiliz-
ation of the cavity length30,36, and a wavelength-division multiplex-
ing (WDM) coupler to extract the addressing pulses, as will be
explained below. Overall, the internal cavity losses are only 18%.
Combined with the 10% of power exiting the cavity through the
coupler, the total round-trip losses are 26%, corresponding to a
relatively high finesse of 24 and to 22-kHz-wide resonances. In
such a cavity, numerical simulations predict 4-ps-long CSs (see
Supplementary Information).
To drive the cavity coherently, that is, to ensure that the driving
beam adds up coherently over successive round trips, the spectral
width of the c.w. driving beam must be narrower than that of the
cavity resonances. For that reason, it is generated by a distributed-
feedback fibre laser exhibiting an ultranarrow 1-kHz linewidth. This
laser operates in the C-band at a wavelength of 1,551 nm, and its
power is boosted up to 225 mW by an erbium-doped fibre amplifier
(EDFA) before the driving beam is launched into the cavity.
The intracavity field is measured through the fourth port of the
90/10 fibre coupler. The output beam is divided into three parts. A
first part is sent towards a digital oscilloscope to observe the CSs
directly in the time domain. Here, to measure the long-term evol-
ution of the CSs and to test their stability, we used an oscilloscope
capable of acquiring 10 million data points at a high sampling
rate (5 Gsample s21) in a single shot, corresponding to observation
times of at least 2 ms or, equivalently, 1,000 round trips. In parallel,
a second part of the beam is sent to an optical spectrum analyser
while the rest is directed to the servo controller that drives the
piezo-electric fibre stretcher and that actively stabilizes the
cavity length.
472
© 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.
NATURE PHOTONICS DOI: 10.1038/NPHOTON.2010.120
EDFA 1,535 nm, 4-ps pulses
Pulsed laser
Driving BPF EDFA 1,551 nm
beam
c.w. laser
Photo- 5 Gsa s−1
Fibre coupler diode oscilloscope
BPF
95/5
Fibre coupler
50/50
WDM
Photodiode
Optical spectrum
analyser
Once the driving beam is turned on, we choose the servo-con-
troller setpoint corresponding to the lower level within the bistable
regime and then launch an addressing pulse into the cavity. The
addressing pulse comes from a mode-locked fibre laser that emits
4-ps pulses with a repetition rate of 10 MHz at 1,535 nm. After
amplification, it is combined with the driving beam through a
WDM coupler placed before the cavity input port. Inside the
cavity, an addressing pulse has a peak power of about 20 W and
interacts with the driving beam through cross-phase modulation2.
In essence, the part of the c.w. intracavity field travelling with the
addressing pulse accumulates an additional phase shift and is
forced to locally switch to the upper bistability branch. This is suffi-
cient to subsequently reshape the local field into a CS. We must
emphasize that this writing process is very robust: it is relatively
insensitive to the exact shape of the addressing pulse, it works for
any combination of wavelengths, it is phase insensitive37, and a
CS can be written with a single addressing pulse, all of which is
very beneficial for practical applications. However, as the addressing
pulse travels at a different velocity to the driving beam, it has the
potential to excite several CSs in a row. The WDM coupler incor-
porated into the cavity prevents this by removing the addressing
pulses before they can excite a second CS.
An acousto-optic modulator (AOM) driven by a pattern genera-
tor is placed along the path of the addressing beam. It allows us
either to select a single pulse or to encode a binary pattern onto
the addressing beam. Figure 2a first illustrates the steady-state
cavity output after a single addressing pulse has been launched
into the cavity. The sequence shown has been taken about 1 s
after the addressing pulse has left the cavity, but essentially identical
traces are observed at all other times. As can be seen, in this con-
dition, the cavity output is constituted of a sequence of nearly iden-
tical pulses with a period equal to the 1.85-ms cavity round-trip time.
This observation is consistent with the presence inside the cavity of
a single pulse that circulates repeatedly. We must emphasize that
despite total round-trip losses of 26%, the pulse that we observe per-
sists in the cavity without decaying, only sustained by the c.w.
driving beam. The intracavity pulse therefore realizes the balance
between losses and coherent driving, which is a first signature of a
CS. To further analyse the nature of the intracavity pulse, we have
measured its temporal duration with an intensity autocorrelator.
The recorded trace is plotted in Fig. 2b (blue). It is compared
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NATURE PHOTONICS DOI: 10.1038/NPHOTON.2010.120 ARTICLES
a 1.85 µs
Output power (a.u.)

Output power (a.u.)

U L B
Round-trip time 1 0 1 0 1 01 1 00 00010

Time (10 µs div−1)

Time (5 µs div−1)
b 1.5
2

power (W)
Intracavity Figure 3 | The acronym of our institution stored all-optically with CSs. ULB
4 ps (Université Libre de Bruxelles) is encoded as a 15-bit data stream in our
Autocorrelation (a.u.)

passive fibre cavity. Each letter is represented with five bits by its ordinal
1
position in the alphabet (U ¼ 21, L ¼ 12, B ¼ 2).
0
−50 0 50
Time (ps) thousand kilometres of fibre. This clearly illustrates its stability
6 ps
and robustness. For comparison, in our fibre, chromatic dispersion
0.5 should double the temporal duration of 4-ps pulses in only about
230 m (ref. 2). Nonlinearity must therefore effectively balance chro-
matic dispersion for the intracavity pulse to propagate undistorted
for so long, a fact that highlights the solitonic character of the intra-
0 cavity pulse. All together, these observations prove that we have
−20 −10 0 10 20 successfully excited a temporal CS inside our cavity.
Time (ps)
An ideal temporal CS should keep its amplitude rigorously con-
c stant over successive round trips. In contrast, the measurement
0 reported in Fig. 2a clearly reveals the presence of pulse-to-pulse fluc-
tuations. We attribute these to several factors. First, as seen in the
bottom of Fig. 2a, the background noise of the photodiode placed in
Power density (dB)

−10
−20
−30
−40
−0.2 −0.1 0 0.1
Frequency (THz)
Figure 2 | Observation of an isolated CS. a, Oscilloscope recording (linear
scale). The delay between subsequent pulses matches the 1.85-ms cavity
round-trip time and confirms the presence inside the cavity of a single
persistent pulse circulating repeatedly, only sustained by the c.w. driving
beam. b, Experimental (blue) intensity autocorrelation trace of the intracavity
pulse. It is compatible with a 4-ps-long CS, as revealed by its comparison
with a numerically simulated trace (red) that corresponds to the temporal
intensity profile of the CS shown in the inset. c, Experimental (blue) and
simulated (red) optical spectrum. The simulated spectrum corresponds to
the CS shown in the inset in b.
with the result of a numerical simulation obtained for the same par-
ameters as the experiment (red) and that corresponds to the tem-
poral intensity profile of the temporal CS shown in the inset.
Clearly, the agreement is remarkable. The dips in the c.w. back-
ground on both sides of the main peak—which are a well-known
feature of CSs38–40—are particularly well reproduced. This confirms
that the recorded autocorrelation trace is compatible with a 4-ps-
long temporal CS. In Fig. 2c, we observe a similarly excellent agree-
ment between the experimental and simulated spectra. The wings of
the spectrum are the signature of the presence of a short pulse inside
the cavity, and the central peak corresponds to the c.w. background
on which it is superimposed. Finally, we must stress that during the
second that separates the addressing pulse from the observations
reported in Fig. 2a, the intracavity pulse has propagated along
about 540,000 cavity round-trips or, equivalently, several hundred
front of the oscilloscope could well account for the totality of the
difference between adjacent pulses. This noise is mainly due to ampli-
fied spontaneous emission (ASE) in the driving laser amplifier, and we
have checked that a larger level of ASE correlates with much stronger
observed pulse-to-pulse variability. The relatively poor signal-to-noise
ratio is largely due to the limited bandwidth of our photodiode and
oscilloscope, as explained in the Methods. With a larger bandwidth
detector, the detected CSs would appear with a larger amplitude on
the same background, so would display comparatively less variability.
0.2 Second, relaxation oscillations of the driving laser lead to fluctuations
of the driving power and perturb the CSs. We have actually checked
that the long-term fluctuations of the CS we observe in Fig. 2a
largely correlate with the fluctuations of the driving power. Longer-
term fluctuations not visible in Fig. 2a are also due to limitations
of the cavity-length stabilization system. The CSs are nevertheless
sufficiently robust to withstand all these perturbations.
To further assess that what we are observing are genuine temporal
CSs, we have verified that they are independently addressable and that
several CSs can coexist in the cavity. To this end, we first used our
AOM to encode a binary-coded data stream onto the addressing
beam and in this way store some data in the cavity in the form of a
sequence of CSs. Note that the input data stream is only sent once
to the cavity input port. Figure 3 shows the cavity output measured
with the oscilloscope after having written a 15-bit sequence encoding
the acronym of our institution, ULB. Each letter is represented by its
ordinal position in the alphabet (U ¼ 21, L ¼ 12, B ¼ 2) coded on
five bits. The presence of a CS encodes a binary 1, and its absence
in the corresponding time slot encodes a 0. As can be seen, the
stored data stream is repeated at the output without degradation,
over and over again. As with a single CS, we have demonstrated a
storage time exceeding one second, only limited by environmental
perturbations that eventually bring the piezo-electric stretcher to
the end of its course. Clearly, this truly demonstrates that our fibre
cavity operates as an all-optical memory.
The low 10-MHz repetition rate of our pulsed addressing laser
prevented us from writing more than 18 bits per cavity round
trip. To investigate how CSs interact and the maximum storage

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ARTICLES NATURE PHOTONICS DOI: 10.1038/NPHOTON.2010.120

a b
0 0

−10 −10

−20 −20
CSs: 39 ps delay
Power density (dB)

Power density (dB)

−30 −30

−40 −40

−50 −50

−60 −60

−70 −70

−80 −80

−90 Addressing pulses: 24.5 ps delay −90 Addressing pulses: 30 ps delay

−150 −100 −50 0 50 100 150 −150 −100 −50 0 50 100 150
Frequency (GHz) Frequency (GHz)

c d
0 0

−10 −10

−20 −20
CSs: 41.5 ps delay CSs: 63.5 ps delay
Power density (dB)

−30 Power density (dB) −30

−40 −40

−50 −50

−60 −60

−70 −70

−80 −80

−90 Addressing pulses: 40 ps delay −90 Addressing pulses: 61 ps delay

−150 −100 −50 0 50 100 150 −150 −100 −50 0 50 100 150
Frequency (GHz) Frequency (GHz)

Figure 4 | Experimental observation of the interactions between close CSs. The green curves are the spectra of the addressing pulses (shifted vertically for
clarity) and the blue curves are the cavity output spectra 1 s later. Periodic spectral fringes marked with sets of vertical dotted lines indicate the presence of
two close pulses and are used to measure the temporal separation between those pulses as displayed on each graph. a, With an initial separation of 25 ps,
no fringes are ever observed on the cavity output spectrum. Only a single CS is excited in this condition. b–d, For larger separations between the addressing
pulses, the CSs repel each other.

density of our optical memory, we added an unbalanced interferom-
eter with a variable delay line on the path of the addressing beam. In
this way, we created pairs of addressing pulses the temporal separ-
ation of which could be continuously varied between 20 and
60 ps. We then checked what happens to the two CSs that are sub-
sequently excited in the cavity and whether they attract or repulse
each other. Because of the limited bandwidth of the oscilloscope,
direct time-domain observations were not possible. Instead, we
relied on the presence of spectral interference fringes on the
cavity output spectrum to detect the presence of stable pairs of
CSs and to measure their temporal separation. Note that those
measurements were performed with multiple CS pairs circulating
simultaneously in the cavity (see Methods).
Figure 4a–d shows the results for four different temporal separ-
ations of the two addressing pulses. In each case, we measured the
spectrum of the addressing pulses before launching them into the
cavity (green), then, about 1 s later, the cavity output spectrum
(blue). Fringes on the spectra (if any) indicate the presence of two
close pulses for which the temporal separation is deduced by
Fourier analysis and displayed on the graph (see Methods for
more details on the finer fringe structure). With addressing pulses
separated by 25 ps or less (Fig. 4a), the output spectrum never exhi-
bits any fringes. Simulations reveal that what happens here is a
sensitive function of the initial conditions. Either only a single CS
is ever generated, or the two CSs initially excited interact attractively
and quickly merge into a single CS. In contrast, with addressing
pulses separated by 30 ps (Fig. 4b), the two CSs strongly repel:
their separation increases to 39 ps, or by about 30%, as they freely
propagate for about 1 s in the cavity. Larger separations of the
addressing pulses lead to a much weaker repulsion, as observed in
Fig. 4c,d. The relatively weaker repulsion observed in Fig. 4c in com-
parison with Fig. 4d may signal the existence of a bound state of CSs.
So far, however, we have not been able to conclusively identify such
a bound state in our experiment, probably due to fluctuations of the
driving power. All our observations are nevertheless compatible
with earlier studies, in particular those performed with spatial
CSs38–40, and are typical of interacting localized DSs41,42. Note that
an all-optical buffer may be affected by the repulsive interactions
between CSs. However, above a separation of 40 ps, the repulsion
clearly becomes very weak, particularly considering that our obser-
vations are performed after the CSs have propagated and interacted
over several hundred thousand cavity round trips. Such weak repul-
sion is actually very challenging to model. We believe that a shallow
modulation superimposed on the driving beam will easily trap the
CSs into specific time slots while at the same time providing a retim-
ing functionality8. It would allow our fibre cavity to store about

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NATURE PHOTONICS DOI: 10.1038/NPHOTON.2010.120
45,000 bits at 25 Gbit s21. This places our cavity memory right in
the operating range of realistic telecommunications systems43,44.
Storage of data streams with higher bit rates would be made possible
by using a fibre with different characteristics (such as a lower chro-
matic dispersion coefficient).
Discussion
Our study provides clear experimental evidences of Kerr temporal
CSs in a c.w. coherently driven all-fibre passive optical cavity.
Both an isolated CS as well as pairs of CSs and their interactions
have been observed. The solitonic nature of the 4-ps pulses that cir-
culate in our cavity was established by observing that they realize the
double balance of chromatic dispersion and losses with, respectively,
nonlinearity and external driving. In our experiment, we have
observed these pulses propagating for several seconds, correspond-
ing to several hundred thousand kilometres, limited only by our
cavity-length stabilization system. Also, we have shown that we
can store a binary-coded data stream in our cavity, realizing an
all-optical memory. In our configuration, the cavity could poten-
tially store up to 45,000 bits at 25 Gbit s21.
In addition to implementing an all-optical memory, our passive
cavity system seamlessly provides the function of an all-optical
reshaper and wavelength converter. Reshaping is obtained thanks
to the robust attractive nature of the CS state, whereas wavelength
conversion naturally follows from the use of a phase-insensitive
and wavelength-insensitive all-optical interaction to excite the
CSs. Indeed, the CSs are generated with the same wavelength as
the driving beam, which is different from that of the addressing
beam. This is potentially very useful for applications in all-optical
routers. Simultaneous re-timing of the incoming data stream
would also be obtained by superimposing a shallow modulation
on the c.w. driving beam1,8. Finally, we must stress that our
system is not critically sensitive to parameters such as the wave-
length of the lasers, the fibre characteristics or the fibre length.
Our cavity has actually been built with standard off-the-shelf com-
ponents and fibres, which highlights the strong potential of our
all-optical memory scheme for practical applications.
For applications as an all-optical memory, the writing time is of
course very important. Although we have not discussed it here
specifically, we have observed that the CSs become established in
about 100 cavity round trips after the addressing pulses are launched
(see Supplementary Information). The writing time can be reduced
by using a shorter and/or lower finesse cavity, to the detriment of
the requirement of a higher driving power. The driving power
could then be lowered by using either highly nonlinear fibres, or
highly nonlinear serpentine waveguides45 or microresonators10 inte-
grated on a chip. Chip integration would also provide a simple way
to make the cavity less sensitive to environmental perturbations.
Addressing pulses about 50% more powerful than what is strictly
necessary to excite a CS in the cavity can also be used to selectively
erase an existing CS in a phase-insensitive manner (see
Supplementary Information). This process in fact implements an
all-optical XOR-logic gate between an incoming data stream and
binary data stored in the cavity as CSs.
To conclude, we have reported the first experimental observation
of both temporal and Kerr CSs. Given the simplicity and the para-
digmatic character of the Kerr cavity model, combined here with the
unidimensionality inherent to fibre optics, our experiment can be
considered as the most fundamental example of self-organization
phenomena in nonlinear optics.
Methods
Experimental set-up. The cavity is composed of standard telecommunications
single-mode silica optical fibre. At 1,550 nm, this fibre presents a second-order
dispersion coefficient b2 ¼ 220 ps2 km21 and a nonlinearity coefficient of
g ≈ 1.8 W21 km21. The intracavity isolator preventing stimulated Brillouin
scattering has a 60-dB isolation factor. The three WDM couplers used to mix the
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ARTICLES
driving and addressing beams as well as to extract the writing beam from the cavity
and from the path to the active stabilization system are three-port coarse WDM
couplers. They separate/mix two channels centred at 1,530 and 1,550 nm with
13-nm-wide passing bands at 0.5 dB. The cavity length stabilization system is based
on a programmable microcontroller driven by a 3-kHz bandwidth photodiode. The
TM
driving beam is generated by a Koheras AdjustiK laser, which is an erbium-doped
distributed feedback fibre laser. It presents a linewidth of ,1 kHz over 120 ms. After
amplification, a narrow tunable bandpass filter (1 nm bandwidth at 0.5 dB) centred
on the driving laser wavelength is used to reject most of the ASE noise of the EDFA
before the driving beam is launched into the cavity. This filter helps to improve the
signal-to-noise ratio when observing the CSs on the oscilloscope. The oscilloscope
used had a large 5 Gsample s21 sampling rate but was limited to a bandwidth of
1 GHz. The photodiode used in front of the oscilloscope also had a 1-GHz
bandwidth. As a result, the oscilloscope response to the short 4-ps-long CSs was very
broad (1 ns) and severely flattened. As the CSs are superimposed on a c.w.
background (the residual c.w. driving beam), the detection contrast of these pulses
on the oscilloscope was very poor. For that reason, we used a sequence of two
identical narrow bandpass filters in front of the oscilloscope. These filters are dense
WDM fibre couplers centred at 1,552 nm, slightly above the wavelength of the c.w.
driving beam, with a spectral width of 0.9 nm at 0.5 dB. This effectively completely
removes the c.w. background of the CSs and greatly improves the signal-to-
noise ratio.
Autocorrelation and spectrum of a single CS (Fig. 2b,c). When a single CS is
present in the cavity as in Fig. 2a, the energy contained in the 4-ps-long CS is about
20,000 times weaker than the energy contained in the c.w. background filling the
cavity. This makes an autocorrelation or a spectral measurement of the intracavity
pulse very difficult to perform. Therefore, for the results presented in Fig. 2b and c,
we actually improved the pulse-to-background energy ratio by filling the cavity with
several thousands CSs before taking the measurements. This was obtained by
keeping the AOM selecting the addressing pulses open for about 100 ms (therefore
letting 1,000 addressing pulses pass through) every 10 ms. The 10-ms re-writing
time interval was chosen to match the scanning period of the autocorrelator. In these
conditions, even if the CSs disappear because the piezo-electric fibre stretcher
reaches the end of its course, the system is reset to its original state for the next scan
of the measuring apparatus. The autocorrelation was averaged over 512 scans. Note
that the number of solitons filling the cavity in those conditions was the only fit
parameter used to match the experimental and simulated results superimposed in
Fig. 2b and c. Additionally, we should point out that, for these measurements, the
optical signal was not obtained through the fourth port of the 90/10 cavity input
coupler. Instead, we used the output of a 1% tap coupler that was incorporated into
the cavity in place of the internal WDM coupler. In this way, we obtained a signal
that was directly proportional to the intracavity intensity and for which the
background was not modified by interference with the reflected driving beam. This
change in the set-up led to slightly increased total cavity round-trip losses of 27%
(instead of the original 26%). Finally, the signal-to-noise ratio of these
measurements was further improved in two other ways. First, the driving power was
increased from 154 mW in Fig. 2a to 224 mW in Fig. 2b,c. Numerical simulations
indicate that this only weakly changes the temporal width of the CS (from 4.4 to
4.1 ps). Second, an EDFA was used in front of the autocorrelator to boost the average
signal power to 100 mW.
Measurements of the spectra of pairs of CSs (Fig. 4). Again, to avoid an over-
whelming c.w. background on the spectral measurements, we filled the cavity with a
large number of pairs of CSs before measuring the cavity output spectrum. Here,
however, to correctly study the interactions between close CSs, it is important to
make sure that the pairs of CSs are not written too close to one another. As the pairs
are written and interleaved over several round trips, and because the repetition time
of the addressing laser is not a simple fraction of the cavity round-trip time, this is
not completely trivial to assess. To this end, we refined our measurements of the two
timescales involved. On the one hand, the repetition time of the addressing laser was
measured by observing the harmonics of the repetition rate of the laser with a 1-GHz
photodiode connected to a radio-frequency spectrum analyser and was found to be
T ¼ 100.1 ns. On the other hand, the cavity round-trip time was deduced from a
long oscilloscope recording of a single CS propagating in the cavity as in Fig. 2a and
was found to be tR ¼ 1,854.3 ns. With those figures, we found that we could keep the
AOM open for 250 ms at a time, or write about 2,500 pairs of CSs over 135 cavity
round trips, while guaranteeing that no two adjacent pairs were closer than 0.7 ns,
which is quite comfortable. The spectral measurements presented in Fig. 4 were
therefore obtained with the AOM open for 250 ms every 1 s, and the spectra were
acquired some time during the 1-s interval between writing sequences. The driving
power was set at 200 mW (this corresponds to the same normalized parameters as
for Fig. 2b,c once the difference in internal cavity round-trip losses is factored in; see
Supplementary Information). Additionally, we should point out that, instead of a
standard OSA with a resolution of 0.1 nm (or 10 GHz) as used for Fig. 2c, we had
access here to an interferometric OSA with an ultrahigh resolution of 100 MHz.
This explains that even with the largest 60 ps delay (Fig. 4d) we have studied, the
spectral fringes are nicely resolved. The resolving power of the OSA is actually good
enough to resolve the spectral fringes resulting from the temporal separation
between the adjacent pairs of CSs filling the cavity. This is what causes the fine fringe
475
ARTICLES
structure visible on the blue curves in Fig. 4b–d. These fringes confirm that adjacent
pairs are not closer than about 0.7 ns. In our operating conditions, the sweep time of
the high-resolution OSA is, however, relatively large, at 0.4 s. This leads to some
uncertainty and averaging in the delays we measure as the two CSs within each pair
keep moving with respect to one another while their spectrum is being measured.
It also prevents us from observing how the temporal separation between two CSs
evolves dynamically with time.
Received 20 January 2010; accepted 6 April 2010;
published online 23 May 2010
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Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to A. Mussot and M. Taki from Laboratoire de Physique des Lasers,
Atomes et Molécules (PhLAM), Université de Lille 1 (Lille, France) and to T. Sylvestre and
J.-M. Merolla, Université de Franche-Comté (Besançon, France) for lending us some
experimental parts, as well as to M. Tlidi, Université Libre de Bruxelles (Brussels, Belgium),
for fruitful discussions. This work was supported by the Belgian Science Policy Office
(BELSPO) Interuniversity Attraction Pole (IAP) programme under grant no. IAP-6/10.
F.L. acknowledges the support of the Fonds pour la formation à la Recherche dans
l’Industrie et dans l’Agriculture (FRIA) (Belgium). The participation of S.C. to this project
was made possible thanks to a Research & Study Leave granted by The University of
Auckland and to a visiting fellowship from the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique
(FNRS) (Belgium). S.C. and The University of Auckland also provided the high-sampling
rate oscilloscope necessary for this project. The work of S.C. is supported by a New
Economy Research Fund (NERF) grant from The Foundation for Research, Science and
Technology of the New Zealand government.
Author contributions
F.L. performed the experiments, starting with the set-up built by S.C. for other studies, and
analysed the results. S.C. helped analyse the results, supervised the experiments, and wrote
the paper. Overall, F.L. and S.C. contributed equally to this work. P.K. provided day-to-day
support both in the laboratory and on theoretical aspects. S.-P.G. helped with the
autocorrelation measurement and in the analysis of the spectral fringes of pairs of CSs.
Ph.E. is the group leader and obtained funding for this work. M.H. supervised the
overall project.
Additional information
The authors declare no competing financial interests. Supplementary information
accompanies this paper at www.nature.com/naturephotonics. Reprints and permission
information is available online at http://npg.nature.com/reprintsandpermissions/.
Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to F.L.
NATURE PHOTONICS | VOL 4 | JULY 2010 | www.nature.com/naturephotonics