Laser cavity-soliton microcombs

By Hualong Bao, A. Cooper, M. Rowley, L. Di Lauro, J. S. Totero Gongora, S. Chu, Brent E. Little, Gian-Luca Oppo, Roberto Morandotti, David J. Moss and 3 more. Nature Photonics, 2019

326 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Microcavity-based frequency combs, or ‘microcombs’1,2, have enabled many fundamental breakthroughs3–21 through the discovery of temporal cavity-solitons. These self-localized waves, described by the Lugiato–Lefever equation22, are sustained by a background of radiation usually containing 95% of the total power23. Simple methods for their efficient generation and control are currently being investigated to finally establish microcombs as out-of-the-lab tools24. Here, we demonstrate microcomb laser cavity-solitons. Laser cavity-solitons are intrinsically background-free and have underpinned key breakthroughs in semiconductor lasers22,25–28. By merging their properties with the physics of multimode systems29, we provide a new paradigm for soliton generation and control in microcavities. We demonstrate 50-nm-wide bright soliton combs induced at average powers more than one order of magnitude lower than the Lugiato–Lefever soliton power threshold22, measuring a mode efficiency of 75% versus the theoretical limit of 5% for bright Lugiato–Lefever solitons23. Finally, we can tune the repetition rate by well over a megahertz without any active feedback.By nesting a Kerr microresonator in a fibre loop with gain, 50-nm-wide bright microcavity-based soliton combs with a mode efficiency of 75% can be induced at average powers more than one order of magnitude lower than the Lugiato–Lefever soliton power threshold, facilitating real-world applications.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Computer Networks and Communications, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/123c469f6e8bff70cb80f586fc074e35f0357226

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Optical data transmission at 44Tb/s and 10 bits/s/Hz over the C-band with standard fibre and a single micro-comb source (2020, background): “Further, boosting the comb generation efficiency through laser cavity-soliton micro-combs [56] may provide a powerful path to improve signal quality and system capacity even further.”
Microcomb-Based Photonic RF Signal Processing (2019, background): “Kerr optical frequency combs [10-22], or “microcombs”, that originated from the optical parametric oscillation in monolithic micro-ring resonators (MRRs), offer distinct advantages over traditional multi-wavelength sources for RF applications, such as the potential to provide a much higher number of”
Photonic RF and microwave filters based on 49 GHz and 200 GHz Kerr microcombs (2020, background): “Integrated optical Kerr frequency comb sources, or “microcombs” [36-52, 102-113] have come into focus as a fundamentally new and powerful tool due to their ability to provide highly coherent multiple wavelength channels with a very high degree of wavelength spacing control, from a single source.”