Birefringence-Managed Normal-Dispersion Fiber Laser Delivering Energy-Tunable Chirp-Free Solitons

Chirp-free solitons have been mainly achieved with anomalous-dispersion fiber lasers by the balance of dispersive and nonlinear effects, and the single-pulse energy is constrained within a relatively small range. Here, we report a class of chirp-free pulse in normal-dispersion erbium-doped fiber lasers, termed birefringence-managed soliton, in which the birefringence-related phase-matching effect dominates the soliton evolution. Controllable harmonic mode locking from 5 order to 85 order is obtained at the same pump level of ~10 mW with soliton energy fully tunable beyond ten times, which indicates a new birefringence-related soliton energy law, which fundamentally differs from the conventional soliton energy theorem. The unique transformation behavior between birefringence-managed solitons and dissipative solitons is directly visualized via the single-shot spectroscopy. The results demonstrate a novel approach of engineering fiber birefringence to create energy-tunable chirp-free solitons in normal-dispersion regime and open new research directions in fields of optical solitons, ultrafast lasers, and their applications.