Ultrafast Chaotic Bunched Solitons Empower High‐Resolution and Long‐Range Optical Fiber Sensing

Abstract Driven by the development of laser physics and technology, controllable manipulation of the light sources has stimulated many potential applications in metrology science. On‐demand customization of light sources paves a promising way for exploring more efficient approaches in pursuit of the ultimate performance of optical sensing. Here, the chaotic bunched solitons are introduced, by leveraging the multi‐soliton bunched evolution in a long‐cavity fiber laser resonator, to implement a high‐resolution and long‐range fiber sensing. This chaotic light source can naturally self‐assembly into a bunched state, endowed by the optical manipulation on high degrees of freedom of ultrafast lasers. Each shot of pulse carries ultra‐high chaotic bandwidth and enables high‐density sensing measurements with a spatial resolution of 6.76 cm over a long distance of 70 km. This approach also emphasizes a high signal‐to‐noise ratio without the need for relay amplification and achieves the ability to reach relative precision surpassing 10 −7 (6.66 mm over 70 km), offering strong potential for continuous and densely distributed sensing. This work spreads the scenarios toward the efficient method of self‐assembled chaos generation, which can lead to a profound impact on many other applications, such as laser ranging, optical communications and random number generation.