We recently discovered a novel ultrafast coupling mechanism of femtosecond solitons via coherent optical phonons inside a solid-state laser cavity, forming stably bound states - “Soliton molecules”[1]. Moreover, preceding the stable binding, the relative motion of two solitons can be harnessed to sample THz phonons using real-time spectroscopy within a single rapid all-optical delay sweep. In this contribution, we discuss the sampling and contrast mechanism for highspeed spectroscopy and compare the scheme to conventional extra-cavity time-domain Raman sampling schemes.
[1] A. Völkel et al., Intracavity Raman Scattering couples Soliton Molecules with Terahertz Phonons, Nature Comms. 13 (1) (2022)
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