Generalized characteristics of soliton in dispersion-managed fiber lasers

The generic characteristics of dispersion-managed fiber laser are systematic investigated experimentally. When the net cavity group-velocity dispersion (GVD) is large negative or positive, it exhibits the features of fiber laser constructed by purely negative or positive components, respectively. Furthermore, we demonstrate that two types of soliton formation mechanisms simultaneously act on one mode-locked pulse as the fiber laser operates in the vicinity of zero net cavity GVD. The features of mode-locked pulse depending on the interaction and competition of cavity dispersion, fiber nonlinearity, laser gain saturation and spectral filtering. In addition, the characteristics of noise-like pulse under different net cavity GVD are also experimentally investigated.