Cascaded generation of coherent Raman dissipative solitons

The cascaded generation of a conventional dissipative soliton (at 1020 nm) together with Raman dissipative solitons of the first (1065 nm) and second (1115 nm) orders inside a common fiber laser cavity is demonstrated experimentally and numerically. With sinusoidal (soft) spectral filtering, the generated solitons are mutually coherent at a high degree and compressible down to 300 fs. Numerical simulation shows that an even higher degree of coherence and shorter pulses could be achieved with step-like (hard) spectral filtering. The approach can be extended toward a high-order coherent Raman dissipative soliton source offering numerous applications such as frequency comb generation, pulse synthesis, biomedical imaging, and the generation of a coherent mid-infrared supercontinuum.