Temporal solitons are optical pulses that arise from the balance of negative group-velocity dispersion and self-phase modulation. For decades, only quadratic dispersion was considered with higher order dispersion often thought of as a nuisance. Following the recent observation of pure-quartic solitons, we here provide experimental and numerical evidence for an infinite hierarchy of solitons that balance self-phase modulation and arbitrary negative pure, even-order dispersion. Specifically, we experimentally demonstrate the existence of solitons with pure-sextic (${\beta }_6$), -octic (${\beta }_8$), and -decic (${\beta }_{10}$) dispersion, limited only by the performance of our components, and we numerically show the existence of solitons involving pure 16th-order dispersion. These results broaden the fundamental understanding of solitons and present avenues to engineer ultrafast pulses in nonlinear optics and its applications.

中文翻译：

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孤子的无限层次：Kerr非线性与偶数阶色散的相互作用

时间孤子是由负的群速度色散和自相位调制的平衡产生的光脉冲。几十年来，人们一直只考虑二次方色散，而高阶色散通常被认为是令人讨厌的。根据最近对纯四次孤子的观察，我们在这里提供实验和数值证据，证明无限个孤子层次可以平衡自相位调制和任意负的纯偶数阶色散。具体而言，我们通过实验证明了纯性孤子（${\beta }_6$），-octic（${\beta }_8$）和-decic（${\beta }_{10}$）色散，仅受组件性能的限制，我们从数字上显示了包含纯16阶色散的孤子的存在。这些结果拓宽了对孤子的基本理解，并为在非线性光学及其应用中设计超快脉冲提供了途径。