Dynamics of asymmetric soliton explosions in ultrafast fiber lasers

Asymmetric soliton explosions are numerically demonstrated in an all-normal-dispersion Yb-doped mode-locked fiber laser based on a lumped model. It is found that the explosion events manifest themselves when the pump strength is tuned to reside between stationary dissipative soliton and noise-like pulse regimes. Remarkably, although the initial conditions and the model itself are symmetric, the explosions occur only at one edge of the soliton, i.e., the pulse leading and trailing edges explode alternately. Our results pave the way for further investigation on the dynamics of soliton explosions in ultrafast fiber lasers.