Dissipative soliton trapping in normal dispersion-fiber lasers

We report on the dissipative soliton (DS) trapping in a fiber ring laser mode locked with a semiconductor saturable absorber mirror and operated in normal dispersion regime. It was shown that despite the fact that a DS is strongly frequency chirped, two DSs formed along the two orthogonal polarization directions of a birefringent cavity fiber laser can incoherently couple and travel with the same group velocity in the laser. Numerical simulations have well confirmed the experimental observations. (C) 2010 Optical Society of America