Phase structure of soliton molecules

Temporal optical soliton molecules were recently demonstrated; they potentially allow further increase of data rates in optical telecommunication. Their binding mechanism relies on the internal phases, but these have not been experimentally accessible so far. Conventional frequency-resolved optical gating techniques are not suited for measurement of their phase profile: Their algorithms fail to converge due to zeros both in their temporal and their spectral profile. We show that the VAMPIRE (very advanced method of phase and intensity retrieval of E-fields) method performs reliably. With VAMPIRE the phase profile of soliton molecules has been measured, and further insight into the mechanism is obtained.