Soliton frequency comb at microwave rates in a high-Q silica microresonator

By Xu Yi, Qifan Yang, Ki Youl Yang, Myoung-Gyun Suh, Kerry J. Vahala. 2015

478 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Frequency combs are having a broad impact on science and technology because they provide a way to coherently link radio/microwave-rate electrical signals with optical-rate signals derived from lasers and atomic transitions. Integrating these systems on a photonic chip would revolutionize instrumentation, time keeping, spectroscopy, navigation, and potentially create new mass-market applications. A key element of such a system-on-a-chip will be a mode-locked comb that can be self-referenced. The recent demonstration of soliton mode locking in crystalline and silicon nitride microresonators has provided a way to both mode lock and generate femtosecond time-scale pulses. Here, soliton mode locking is demonstrated in high-Q silica resonators. The resonators produce low-phase-noise soliton pulse trains at readily detectable pulse rates—two essential properties for the operation of frequency combs. A method for the long-term stabilization of the solitons is also demonstrated, and is used to test the theoretical dependence of the comb power, efficiency, and soliton existence power on the pulse width. The influence of the Raman process on the soliton existence power and efficiency is also observed. The resonators are microfabricated on silicon chips and feature reproducible modal properties required for soliton formation. A low-noise and detectable pulse rate soliton frequency comb on a chip is a significant step towards a fully integrated frequency comb system.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/91f7a93d6dd3b7305d48eba37600058988192129

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Dispersion engineering and measurement of whispering gallery mode microresonator for Kerr frequency comb generation (2020, background): “DKSs have been successively demonstrated in a wide variety of microresonators, ranging from silica [34], silicon nitride [35, 36], silicon [37], aluminum nitride [38], and lithium niobate [39], since the first observation of DKSs in crystalline microresonators [28].”
Micro-combs: A novel generation of optical sources (2017, background): “The authors noted a one-to-one relationship between de-tuning and several soliton properties and used it to provide long-term locking of the laser de-tuning [222,223].”
RF Photonics: An Optical Microcombs’ Perspective (2018, background): “integrated heaters [96], [171], and so forth [172], [173].”
Modelocked mid-infrared frequency combs in a silicon microresonator (2016, unknown): “) by operating in the over-coupled regime of the resonator with low pump power, which allows for high pump eciency and minimal change in the intracavity power when transitioning to the soliton state [27]. In addition, operation in the over-coupled regime alleviates the requirements of some complex t”