Soliton compression in Brillouin fiber lasers

Pulse propagation in optical fibers may electrostrictively excite acoustic waves as a result of cladding Brillouin scattering, transversally propagati ng with respect to the fiber axis in the fiber's cladding, and mechanical c oating. We show, for the first time to our knowledge, experimentally and th eoretically that these transverse resonances within finite frequency ranges may cooperatively couple with the acoustic longitudinal modes of a fiber r esonator, giving rise to stable trains of either spread or compressed three -wave Brillouin solitons and propose a first stability map for the rich fou r-wave dissipative dynamics. (C) 2001 Optical Society of America.