Temporal manipulation of period-2 polarization domain wall solitons in a nonlinear fiber Kerr resonator

We report on the experimental demonstration of temporal manipulations of dissipative polarization domain wall solitons in a Kerr nonlinear resonator operated in a period-doubled configuration. Our experiments are performed in a coherently driven normally dispersive fiber ring cavity, in which polarization domains emerge in virtue of a spontaneous symmetry breaking phenomenon. The addition of a lumped birefringent defect into the cavity forces their polarization components to swap on a two-round-trip cycle, thus protecting them from the deleterious impact of the system's asymmetries. We exploit these symbiotic dynamics in proof-of-concept buffering experiments, in which these dissipative structures are addressed individually and temporally manipulated through phase-encoded perturbations imprinted onto the driving beam. Our results provide new insights into the practical exploitation of spontaneous symmetry breaking mechanisms and the use of two-component dissipative structures for all-optical data storage applications.