Real-Time Study of Coexisting States in Laser Cavity Solitons

Laser cavity-solitons microcombs have been recently introduced by our team at the University of Sussex [1] . To gain insight into their dynamics, they need to be studied with an extremely high temporal resolution, as they are ultrashort pulses of hundreds of femtoseconds and at the same time, on a long temporal span, to observe their formation dynamics and subsequent interactions. These challenging temporal features require the development of ad-hoc metrological tools such as Dispersive Fourier Transform, which has opened the research field of so-called ‘non-repetitive’ events [2] . In nonlinear optics, this includes the study of optical rogue waves [3] and solitons collision-induced explosion in mode-locked lasers [4] .