Dark solitons in mode-locked lasers

Dark soliton formation in mode-locked lasers is investigated by means of a power-energy saturation model which incorporates gain and filtering saturated with energy, and loss saturated with power. It is found that general initial conditions evolve into dark solitons under appropriate requirements also met in the experimental observations. The resulting pulses are well approximated by dark solitons of the unperturbed nonlinear Schr"{o}dinger equation. Notably, the same framework also describes bright pulses in anomalous and normally dispersive lasers.