Timing‐Injection Locking in a Self‐Starting Mamyshev Oscillator Induced by the Dissipative Faraday Instability

Abstract

Mamyshev oscillators (MOs), a novel class of passively mode‐locked fiber lasers, serve as an excellent platform to explore complex nonlinear dynamics, ranging from localized structures to chaos. Despite their versatility, achieving self‐starting mode‐locking remains a significant challenge. In this study, the critical role of the dissipative Faraday instability (DFI) in facilitating the self‐starting process of Mos is unveiled, where the DFI triggers the symmetry breaking of the homogeneous solution to overcome the initiation barriers. A panoramic view of several distinct operational regimes with distinct DFI patterns is provided, namely the non‐self‐starting states, the irregular patterns, the harmonic mode locking regime, the stable single pulse and the stable multi pulse regime. For the latest case, the origins of randomness in these pulse sequences through analyzing the causality between the timing of the random pulses and the initial seeding conditions are uncovered. Building upon these findings, the novel time‐injection locking technique is proposed to customize the temporal locations of the pulses as well as the pattern timing in MOs, thus demonstrating its potential for applications in all‐optical data storage and tunable ultrashort pulse sources.