Pulse breaking through spectral filtering in dispersion-managed fiber lasers

We unveil numerically the mechanism governing the onset of multiple pulsing in dispersion-managed mode-locked fiber lasers. This mechanism mainly results from the opposition between spectral narrowing induced by intracavity filtering and spectral broadening through self-phase modulation. When spectral broadening reaches a critical point, the interplay of these two effects entails pulse breaking, followed by a relaxation process that brings back the pulse spectrum within the filter bandwidth limits.