Coexistence of harmonic soliton molecules and rectangular noise-like pulses in a figure-eight fiber laser

We report the coexistence of high-order harmonic soliton molecules and rectangular noise-like pulses (NLP) in a figure-eight fiber laser mode-locked by a nonlinear amplifying loop mirror. The harmonic soliton molecule has a repetition rate of 936.6 MHz, corresponding to the 466th harmonics of the fundamental cavity repetition rate, with soliton separation of 16.5 ps. Meanwhile, the rectangular NLP operates at the fundamental repetition rate. In addition, these two types of pulses could be generated independently by manipulating the polarization controllers. The experimental results demonstrate an interesting operation regime of the fiber laser and contribute to enriching the dynamics of mode-locked pulses in fiber lasers. (C) 2016 Optical Society of America