Intricate solitons state in passively mode-locked fiber lasers

We report a novel spontaneous soliton pattern formation in a figure-of-eight passively mode-locked erbium-doped double-clad fiber laser. It consists in a condensate phase in which there is almost periodic arrangement of alternate crystal and liquid soliton phases. Thanks to an adapted ansatz for the electric field, we perform a reconstruction allowing to clearly identify the soliton distribution along the cavity