Uni-and bidirectional soliton rains in a NALM mode-locked Tm-doped fiber laser

We report the generation of different drifting patterns of soliton rains in a Tm-doped fiber laser mode locked by the technique of nonlinear amplifying loop mirror. The directional control of drifting soliton rain has been achieved by varying pump power and polarization. At a stable pumping level, a kind of bidirectional soliton rain is observed from a unidirectional one for the first time. In the bidirectional case, the forward and backward solitons, leaving from the two sides of the condensed phase, appear in the spectrum as two typical soliton peaks on a wide pedestal, 2 nm in separation. The spectral result implies that the secondary drifting solitons are formed by developing one strong sideband of the primary soliton rain, induced by a shift of the transmission peak.