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 sturctures to chaos. Despite their versatility, achieving self-starting mode-locking remains a significant challenge, especially in the normal dispersion regime. In this study, we unveil the critical role of the dissipative Faraday instability (DFI) in facilitating the self-starting process of MOs, where the DFI triggers the symmetry breaking of the homogeneous solution to overcome the initiation barriers. This discovery provides a panoramic view of several distinct operational regimes with distinct DFI patterns for the very first time, 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 lattest case, we uncover the origins of randomness in these pulse sequences through analyzing the causality between the timing of the random pulses and the initial iterative condition, referred to as the embryonic light. Building upon these findings, we propose the novel time-injection locking (TIL) technique 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.