1State Key Laboratory of Precision Measurement Technology and Instruments, Department of Precision Instruments, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
2State Key Laboratory of Information Photonics and Optical Communications, School of Electronic Engineering, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China
3School of Physics and Electronic Engineering, Hainan Normal University, Haikou 571158, China
Spatiotemporal mode locking is a nonlinear process of multimode soliton self-organization. Here the real-time buildup dynamics of the multiple solitons in a spatiotemporal mode-locked multimode fiber laser are investigated, assisted by the time-stretch technique. We find that the buildup processes are transverse mode dependent, especially during the stages of relaxation oscillation and -switching prior to multiple soliton formation. Furthermore, we observe that the transverse modal composition of these generated pulses among the multiple solitons can be different from each other, indicating the spatiotemporal structure of the multiple soliton. A simplified theoretical model based on pulse energy evolution is put forward to interpret the role of 3D saturable absorber on spatiotemporal structures of spatiotemporal mode-locking multiple solitons. Our work has presented the spatiotemporal nonlinear dynamics in multimode fiber lasers, which are novel to those inside the single transverse mode fiber lasers.