Rains of solitons in a fiber laser

We report a novel and intriguing nonlinear dynamics observed in a fiber laser cavity, in which soliton pulses are created from an extended noisy background and drift until they reach a condensed phase comprising several tens of aggregated solitons. This soliton flow can be adjusted with manual cavity tuning, and can even be triggered by the injection of an external low-power cw laser. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America