Fig. 1

Characteristics of hybrid solitons. a Principle of soliton fission in a hybrid liquid/silica fibre possessing a typical highly non-instantaneous nonlinearity (here CS₂ according to¹⁶). b–m Pulse propagation characteristics along 10 dispersive lengths pumped with a sech-squared pulse (τ _FWHM = 450 fs) in the anomalous dispersion regime (const. β ₂, const. γ ₀) for four different lossless systems: b–d no nonlinearity, e–g entirely instantaneous nonlinearity with soliton number N = 1, h–j entirely non-instantaneous nonlinearity based on CS₂ and k–m hybrid nonlinearity with both instantaneous (15%) and non-instantaneous contributions (85%). The linear colour scale represents peak power normalised to 50% of the input peak power