Self-starting switchable multifunctional solitons fiber laser

Modern solitons fiber lasers systems, sought for imaging, micromachining,
metrology, spectroscopy and sensing applications, require multifunctional light sources with fully controlled switching feature to avail the necessary optical signal. Existing single cavity fiber laser systems have limitations on the generation of multi-state solitons due to the intrinsic dispersion, nonlinearity, filtering, gain and loss. In this work, for the very first time, we demonstrate a compact multifunctional solitons fiber laser controlled by the 3Dmaneuvering of polarization beam splitter (PBS) to select the appropriate polarization state of
the cavity light signal for various mode-locked operations. For single soliton state operation, conventional solitons (CSs), quasi-coherent noise-like pulses (QC-NLPs) and harmonic mode-locking are achieved independently, and these different soliton states can be easily and efficiently switched by steering the PBS position. Versatile hybrid dual-wavelength modelocked operations (2-CSs states, 1-CS state and 1-QC-NLP sate, and 2-QC-NLPs sates) are additional functionalities achievable when the PBS position steered to suitable positions. The hybrid dual-wavelength mode-locked operation has excellent long-term stability even at maximum output power. We envisage that our work provides a compact switchable multifunctional solitons fiber laser system that can be used in applications like optics signalprocessing, micromachining, optical communications, spectroscopy and optical sensing