Molecules of temporal solitons: experimental evidence

This work reports on the first experimental verification of soliton molecules. A scale model of a realistic transmission line is developed, so as to reduce tens or hundreds of kilometers to tens of meters of fiber. With input pulses around 300 fs all fiber lengths involved are scaled down to manageable values. This pulse duration is considered the best compromise in the presence of perturbations from Raman effect or higher order dispersion; these will affect the scale model more than a full scale setup, so that conservative extrapolations from our worst-case to real-sized systems can be made.