Abstract

It is now well established that soliton mechanisms are responsible for formation and shortening of pulses in passively mode-locked and dispersion controlled lasers (1, 2). Nevertheless in all works dealing with temporal solitons propagation (2, 3) spatial solitons self-guided propagation (4) or theoretical studies on soliton lasers (5), only symmetrical shapes were considered. This leads to the misconception that solitons could only have symmetrical shapes.

© 1988 Optical Society of America