Universal dynamics and deterministic switching of dissipative Kerr solitons in optical microresonators

By Maxim Karpov, Hairun Guo, E. Lucas, A. Kordts, Martin Hubert Peter Pfeiffer, Victor Brasch, G. Lihachev, V. Lobanov, Michael L. Gorodetsky, Tobias J. Kippenberg. Nature Physics, 2016

298 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Temporal dissipative Kerr solitons in optical microresonators enable the generation of ultrashort pulses and low-noise frequency combs at microwave repetition rates. They have been demonstrated in a growing number of microresonator platforms, enabling chip-scale frequency combs, optical synthesis of low-noise microwaves and multichannel coherent communications. In all these applications, accessing and maintaining a single-soliton state is a key requirement—one that remains an outstanding challenge. Here, we study the dynamics of multiple-soliton states and report the discovery of a simple mechanism that deterministically switches the soliton state by reducing the number of solitons one by one. We demonstrate this control in Si3N4 and MgF2 resonators and, moreover, we observe a secondary peak to emerge in the response of the system to a pump modulation, an effect uniquely associated with the soliton regime. Exploiting this feature, we map the multi-stability diagram of a microresonator experimentally. Our measurements show the physical mechanism of the soliton switching and provide insight into soliton dynamics in microresonators. The technique provides a method to sequentially reduce, monitor and stabilize an arbitrary state with solitons, in particular allowing for feedback stabilization of single-soliton states, which is necessary for practical applications. A study of the dynamics of so-called Kerr solitons in optical microresonators reports the discovery of a simple mechanism that permits the step-wise reduction of soliton states, one by one.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1ab7b1c115cabe925e6a411f149f5ea03a2116d1

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Modelocked mid-infrared frequency combs in a silicon microresonator (2016, unknown): “Recently, there have been several dem-onstrations of such mode locking in the near-infrared regime [9,12,24 – 28].”
Dissipative Kerr solitons in optical microresonators (2018, background): “Likewise, soliton crystallization (63) and switching (64) have been observed to occur.”
Universal dynamics and deterministic switching of dissipative Kerr solitons in optical microresonators (2017, background): “In our work [1], we discovered a simple mechanism that deterministically switches the soliton state, allowing for the generation of single-soliton-based frequency combs.”