Ultrafast Chaotic Bunched Solitons Empower High-Resolution and Long-Range Optical Fiber Sensing

Driven by the development of laser physics and technology, controllable manipulation of the light sources has stimulated many potential applications in metrology science. On-demand customization of light sources paves a promising way for exploring more efficient approaches in pursuit of the ultimate performance of optical sensing. Here, the chaotic bunched solitons are introduced, by leveraging the multi-soliton bunched evolution in a long-cavity fiber laser resonator, to implement a high-resolution and long-range fiber sensing. This chaotic light source can naturally self-assembly into a bunched state, endowed by the optical manipulation on high degrees of freedom of ultrafast lasers. Each shot of pulse carries ultra-high chaotic bandwidth and enables high-density sensing measurements with a spatial resolution of 6.76 cm over a long distance of 70 km. This approach also emphasizes a high signal-to-noise ratio without the need for relay amplification and achieves the ability to reach relative precision surpassing 10⁻⁷ (6.66 mm over 70 km), offering strong potential for continuous and densely distributed sensing. This work spreads the scenarios toward the efficient method of self-assembled chaos generation, which can lead to a profound impact on many other applications, such as laser ranging, optical communications and random number generation.