Optical solitons generated from fiber lasers have been extensively investigated for their good stability, narrow pulse width and high peak power, which play an indispensable role in many fields such as mechanical micromachining, optical microscope, imaging technology, optical soliton communication and so on. In this review, we summarize the development of soliton fiber laser, and the current application of soliton pulses. There are many different kinds of mode-locking technologies to generate solitons, such as actively mode-locked fiber lasers, passively mode-locked fiber lasers and hybrid mode-locked fiber lasers. During the long-term research of solitons, various types of solitons have been gradually realized under different group velocity dispersion (GVD) conditions in passively mode-locked fiber lasers, such as conventional solitons (CSs) (GVD < 0), dispersion-managed solitons (DMSs) (GVD≈0), self-similar solitons (GVD ≥ 0), dissipative solitons (DSs) (GVD > 0). And in order to apply solitons to more fields, soliton amplification and compression technologies are widely used to improve the performance of solitons, such as chirped pulse amplification (CPA) technology, self-similar soliton amplification technology, large-mode area (LMA) fiber, etc. Finally, the development prospect of soliton in the future is prospected.

光纤激光器产生的光孤子具有良好的稳定性，窄的脉冲宽度和高的峰值功率，已被广泛研究，它们在机械微加工，光学显微镜，成像技术，孤子通信等许多领域起着不可或缺的作用。在这篇综述中，我们总结了孤子光纤激光器的发展以及孤子脉冲的当前应用。产生孤子的锁模技术有许多种，例如主动锁模光纤激光器，被动锁模光纤激光器和混合锁模光纤激光器。在对孤子的长期研究中，无源锁模光纤激光器在不同的群速度色散（GVD）条件下逐渐实现了各种类型的孤子，例如常规孤子（CSs）（GVD <0），色散管理孤子（DMS）（GVD≈0），自相似孤子（GVD≥0），耗散孤子（DSs）（GVD> 0）。为了将孤子应用于更多领域，孤子放大和压缩技术被广泛用于改善孤子的性能，例如chi脉冲放大（CPA）技术，自相似孤子放大技术，大模面积（LMA）光纤最后，对孤子的未来发展前景进行了展望。