Real-time measurements of incoherent instabilities and rogue waves in an extreme broadband dissipative soliton laser

We report numerical and experimental studies of instabilities in a “noise-like pulse” dissipative soliton laser generating an output spectrum of 1000 nm bandwidth, and with two orders of magnitude variation in intracavity spectral width over one roundtrip. Simulations identify the origin of the laser instability as the sensitivity to noise of nonlinear soliton dynamics. Our experiments use real-time time and frequency domain measurements, and our simulations reproduce quantitatively both the full extent of intracavity supercontinuum broadening, as well as the probability distributions of temporal and spectral fluctuations, including rogue waves.