Recent advances in optical solitons via low-dimensional materials in mode-locking fiber lasers

The year 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the first theoretical prediction for optical solitons forming in optical fibers. In the past decades, optical soliton has attracted intense interest in the field of laser communications, ultrafast spectroscopy, and optics imaging in the past decades for its stably propagating a long distance in dispersive media with no change in their shapes. The most important generation method of optical solitons is passively mode-locking in which saturable absorbers (SAs) are a crucial device for optical solitons generation. Recently, low-dimensional (LD) nanomaterials-based SAs have received significant attention in fiber lasers owing to their unique electronic structures and exceptional nonlinear optical characteristics. Various optical solitons are explored based on LD nanomaterials. In this review, research on optical solitons via LD nanomaterials-based SAs is discussed by the bibliometric method. This analysis sample includes articles from 2002 to the present. In addition, the research status of LD nanomaterials-based SAs is discussed. A detailed overview of optical solitons based on LD SAs fiber lasers is presented, including conventional solitons (CSs), dispersion-managed solitons (DMSs), dissipative solitons (DSs), etc. Through the discussion in the review, we will gain a new understanding of optical solitons and propose ideas for future development.