Temporal solitons in microresonators driven by optical pulses

By E. Obrzud, Steve Lecomte, Tobias Herr. Nature Photonics, 2016

332 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Continuous-wave laser-driven, high-Q Kerr–nonlinear optical microresonators have enabled the generation of optical frequency combs, ultralow-noise microwaves and ultrashort optical pulses at tens of gigahertz repetition rate. Here, we break with the paradigm of the continuous-wave driving and instead use periodic, picosecond optical pulses. In a fibre-based Fabry–Pérot microresonator we observe the deterministic generation of stable femtosecond dissipative cavity solitons ‘on top’ of the resonantly enhanced driving pulses. The solitons lock to the driving pulse, which enables direct all-optical control of the soliton's repetition rate and tuning of its carrier-envelope offset frequency. When compared with continuous-wave-driven microresonators or non-resonant pulsed supercontinuum generation, this new approach is more efficient and can yield broadband frequency combs at an average driving power significantly below the continuous-wave parametric threshold. Bridging the fields of continuous-wave-driven resonant and pulse-driven non-resonant nonlinear optics, these results enable efficient microresonator frequency combs, resonant supercontinuum generation and microphotonic pulse compression. By driving a high-Q fibre-based Fabry–Pérot microresonator with periodic, picosecond optical pulses, deterministic generation of stable femtosecond dissipative cavity solitons has been experimentally realized.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/268485b8b74a14374fde66927053b92d33e2cecb

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

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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): “While this would require locking the comb spacing to an external RF source, sub-MHz stabilization of comb spacings has been reported [54, 55].”
Dissipative Kerr solitons in optical microresonators (2018, methodology): “” Since their observation in microresonators, such DKSs have been generated in a wide variety of microresonators, ranging from bulk crystalline (9, 16) and silica microdisks (17) to photonic chip-scale devices (17–20), under both continuous-wave (CW) and pulsed excitation (21).”