This PDF file contains the front matter associated with SPIE Proceedings Volume 11986, including the Title Page, Copyright information, Table of Contents, and Conference Committee listings.

Soliton solutions of the Haus master equation and the transverse wave equation are discussed. These solutions are obtained by converting the eigenvalue problem of a differential operator into an algebraic problem. Compared to free space solutions of the respective equation, the solutions space shrinks to discrete soliton solutions, which often strongly deviate from the well-known bell-shaped free space solutions. We find qualitatively very similar solutions describing two very different physical scenarios. As these solitons show a similar reaction to a limited support in the Fourier domain, we term these characteristic profiles cage solitons.

We experimentally investigate the noise-driven thermalization of the Fermi Pasta Ulam Tsingou (FPUT) recurrences. In fiber optics, such dynamic is observed when the spontaneous modulation instability (MI), generating noise floor amplification, is able to compete with seeded MI, at the origin of the coherent energy transfers between the Fourier modes. An input noise tuning setup is implemented, combined with a heterodyne time domain reflectometer which allows to record the power and phase distributions of the Fourier modes. By also recording the fiber output spectra, we highlight a progressive loss of the process coherence and the breakup of the FPUT recurrences.

We study the polarization dynamics of ultrafast solitons in mode-locked fiber lasers. We found that when a stable soliton is generated, its state-of-polarization shifts toward a stable state, and when the soliton is generated with excess power levels it experiences relaxation oscillations in its intensity and timing. On the other hand, when a soliton is generated in an unstable state-of-polarization, it either decays in intensity until it disappears, or its temporal width decreases until it explodes into several solitons, and then it disappears. All our results are supported by both experimental measurements and calculated results. For numerically modeling the dynamics of ultrafast solitons we resort to a non-Lagrangian approach for simulating coupled complex Ginzburg-Landau equations for the two components of the electric wave vector. Here we present the numerical code and results and explain in details how we obtained them.

The detection of rapid dynamics in diverse physical systems is traditionally very difficult and strongly dominated by several noise contributions. Laser mode-locking, electron bunches in accelerators and optical-triggered phases in materials are events that carry important information about the system from which they emerge. To understand the underlying dynamics of complex systems often large numbers of single-shot measurements must be acquired continuously over a long time with extremely high temporal resolution. Ultrafast real-time instruments allow the acquisition of large data sets, even for rare events, in a relatively short time period. The real-time measurement of fast single-shot events with large record lengths is one of the most challenging problems in the fields of instrumentation and measurement. In this contribution, the novel ultra-fast and continuous data sampling system THERESA using photonic time-stretch is presented and its performance is discussed. The proposed data acquisition system is based on the latest ZYNQ Radio Frequency System on Chip (ZYNQ-RFSoC) family from Xilinx, which combines an array of fast (GS/s) multi-channel Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADCs) with a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and a multi-core ARM processor in a single heterogeneous programmable device. The stretched pulse is sampled in parallel by 16 wideband sampling channels operating in time-interleaving mode. The sampled data is transferred by a 100 Gb Ethernet data link to the Data Acquisition (DAQ) compute node for further analysis. The combination of both, the photonic time-stretch and the fast sampling system, is capable of sampling short pulses with femtosecond time resolution. Applications of the new system, hardware implementation and the commissioning of the first system for the electron bunch diagnostics are presented.

Optical activity spectroscopy such as circular dichroism (CD) and optical rotatory dispersion (ORD) is frequently employed to investigate (bio)-molecular structures and chiroptical responses of materials. Here we present an innovative, simple configuration for the quick and sensitive measurements of broadband optical activity spanning the visible and nearinfrared. A linearly polarized light illuminates a chiral sample to create a chiral free-induction decay field (CFID), along with an orthogonally polarized achiral transmitted field which serves as the phase-locked local oscillator for heterodyne amplifications. A common-path birefringent interferometer varies the relative delay between the chiral and achiral components and a balanced photodetector records their delay-dependent interferogram from which broadband CD and ORD spectra are obtained by the Fourier transform. Using an incoherent thermal light source, we achieve state-of-the-art sensitivity for broadband CD and ORD spectra, with a measurement time of just a few seconds. The setup allows highly sensitive measurements of glucose concentration and real-time monitoring of fast asymmetric chemical reactions. In comparison to standard spectropolarimeters, our setup is considerably faster, more compact, and cost-effective, as it does not require any monochromator, photo-elastic modulator, or lock-in amplifier. The setup also accepts ultrashort pulses, thus paving the way towards broadband transient optical activity spectroscopy and broadband CD imaging.

We study the aberrations of four-wave mixing-based time-lenses resulting from the cross-phase modulations of the pump wave. These temporal aberrations have no spatial equivalent and are important when imaging weak signals with strong pump waves.In this work we show that as the pump power increases the cross-phase modulations of the pump are responsible for shifting, defocusing, and imposing temporal coma aberrations on the image.