Nonlinear pulse shaping and soliton dynamics in mode-locked fibre lasers

International audience; We review several new nonlinear mechanisms of pulse shaping that currently drive rapid progress in passively mode-locked bre lasers. These include self-similar (similariton) propagation in passive and active bres, a mode-locking regime featuring pulses with a triangular distribution of the intensity, and spectral compression arising from nonlinear pulse propagation. We also present recent experimental results on new families of vector solitons with the precessing states of polarization for fundamental, multipulse and bound state soliton operations in a carbon nanotube mode-locked bre laser operating at anomalous dispersion