Observation of bound solitons in a passively mode-locked fiber laser

Summary form only given. Recently B.A. Malomed theoretically predicted the existence of bound states of solitons in the dissipatively perturbed nonlinear Schrodinger equation. In this talk we report on the first experimental observation of bound soliton states in a passively mode locked fiber soliton laser. Multiple soliton operation is a generic feature of passively mode-locked fiber soliton lasers and has been reported by many authors.