| Mode-locked lasers are an ideal "playground" for studying soliton dynamics. Since the pulse is sampled once per round trip, the evolution can be monitored over long effective propagation distances. It is also possible to capture rare/intermittent events due, for example, to soliton instabilities. Furthermore, some parameters can be varied continuously, allowing systematic studies that are not possible in other systems. Several examples of such experimental studies will be presented. Recent interest in the developement of mode-locked lasers has focused on carrier-envelope phase stabilization, which in the frequency domain corresponds to the generation of a frequency comb. How the width of the comb lines arise from fluctuations of the solitons inside the laser due to driven by noise processes will be discussed. |
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