An infinite hierarchy of solitons: the interaction of Kerr nonlinearity with even-orders of dispersion
22 February 2021
Temporal solitons are optical pulses that arise from the balance of negative group-velocity dispersion and self-phase modulation. For decades, only quadratic dispersion was considered, with higher order dispersion thought of as a nuisance. Following the recent observation of pure-quartic solitons, we here provide experimental and numerical evidence for an infinite hierarchy of solitons that balance self-phase modulation and arbitrary negative pure, even-order dispersion. Speciphically,we experimentally demonstrate the existence of solitons with pure-sextic (Beta6), -octic (Beta8) and -decic(Beta10) dispersion, limited only by the performance of our components, and we numerically show the existence of solitons involving pure 16th order dispersion. These results broaden the fundamental understanding of solitons and present new avenues to engineer ultrafast pulses in nonlinear optics and its applications.
