Phase-tailored assembly and encoding of dissipative soliton molecules

Self-assembly of particle-like dissipative solitons,in the presence of mutual interactions,emphasizes the vibrant concept of soliton molecules in varieties of laser resonators.Controllable manipulation of the molecular patterns,held by the degrees of freedom of internal motions,still remains challenging to explore more efficient and subtle tailoring approaches for the increasing demands.Here,we report a new phase-tailored quaternary encoding format based on the controllable internal assembly of dissipative soliton molecules.Artificial manipulation of the energy exchange of soliton-molecular elements stimulates the deterministic harnessing of the assemblies of internal dynamics.Self-assembled soliton molecules are tailored into four phase-defined regimes,thus constituting the phase-tailored quaternary encoding format.Such phase-tailored streams are endowed with great robustness and are resistant to significant timing jitter.All these results experimentally demonstrate the programmable phase tailoring and exemplify the application of the phase-tailored quaternary encoding,prospectively promoting high-capacity all-optical storage.

High-order femtosecond vortices up to the 30th order generated from a powerful mode-locked Hermite-Gaussian laser

Femtosecond vortex beams are of great scientific and practical interest because of their unique phase properties in both the longitudinal and transverse modes,enabling multi-dimensional quantum control of light fields.Until now,generating femtosecond vortex beams for applications that simultaneously require ultrashort pulse duration,high power,high vortex order,and a low cost and compact laser source has been very challenging due to the limitations of available generation methods.Here,we present a compact apparatus that generates powerful high-order femtosecond vortex pulses via astigmatic mode conversion from a mode-locked Hermite-Gaussian Yb:KGW laser oscillator in a hybrid scheme using both the translation-based off-axis pumping and the angle-based non-collinear pumping techniques.This hybrid scheme enables the generation of femtosecond vortices with a continuously tunable vortex order from the 1st up to the 30th order,which is the highest order obtained from any femtosecond vortex laser source based on a mode-locked oscillator.The average powers and pulse durations of all resulting vortex pulses are several hundred milliwatts and<650 fs,respectively.In particular,424-fs 11th-order vortex pulses have been achieved with an average power of 1.6 W,several times more powerful than state-of-the-art oscillator-based femtosecond vortex sources.

100-W Yb:YAG thin-disk vortex laser oscillator

Optical vortices carrying orbital angular momentum and spiral wavefront phases have garnered increasing research interest owing to their numerous applications.Here,we present a simple yet effective approach to generate powerful optical vortices directly from a thin-disk laser oscillator.The demonstrated source delivered Laguerre-Gaussian beams with an output power of up to 101 W.To the best of our knowledge,this is the highest output power of all optical vortex laser oscillators.The high-power vortex output will have significant implications for laser ablation and micromachining at high throughput and for large-area applications.Additionally,it serves as a new platform for the further development of more complex high-power optical-vortex beams.