Mode-locked dark pulse Kerr combs in normal-dispersion microresonators

By Xiaoxiao Xue, Yi Xuan, Yang Liu, Pei-Hsun Wang, S. Chen, Jian Wang, Daniel E. Leaird, Minghao Qi, Andrew M. Weiner. Nature Photonics, 2014

625 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The generation of Kerr frequency combs in a coherently driven nonlinear microresonator is now extensively investigated more generally by the research community as a potentially portable technology for a variety of applications. Here, we report experiments in which dark pulse combs are formed in normal-dispersion microresonators with mode-interaction-assisted excitation, and mode-locking transitions are observed in the normal-dispersion regime. The mode-interaction-aided excitation of dark pulses appears to occur through a deterministic pathway, in sharp contrast to the situation for bright pulses in the anomalous dispersion region. The ability to mode-lock in the normal-dispersion regime increases the freedom in the microresonator design and may make it possible to extend Kerr comb generation into the visible, where material dispersion is likely to dominate. Dark pulse combs are formed in normal-dispersion microresonators with mode-interaction-assisted excitation, increasing freedom in microresonator design and potentially extending Kerr comb generation into the visible wavelength regime.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b606faf4c58257830b88fbf1db94d76426537ea5

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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): “The discovery of temporal soliton states (DKS – dissipative Kerr solitons) [4,7-11] as a means of mode-locking microcombs has enabled breakthroughs in many fields including spectroscopy [12,13], microwave photonics [14], frequency synthesis [15], optical ranging [16,17], quantum sources [18,19], met”
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”
Temporal solitons in microresonators driven by optical pulses (2016, background): “This is similar to dark pulse generation where the overlap of bright portions of the intracavity waveform with the driving light is optimized[68, 69].”
Micro-combs: A novel generation of optical sources (2017, methodology): “Tomeasure the optical time-domainwaveform inside themicro-resonator, the fibre dispersion after the micro-resonator needs to be compensated [51,169].”
Photonic microwave true time delays for phased array antennas using a 49 GHz FSR integrated optical micro-comb source [Invited] (2018, background): “Looking to the future, highconversion-efficiency Kerr combs generated by dark pulses [63] may provide an attractive solution to produce appropriately shaped combs with much higher energy efficiency.”
High-Q silicon nitride microresonators exhibiting low-power frequency comb initiation (2016, methodology): “[27] cannot unequivocally determine the coupling regime when the coupling is very close to critical.”
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.”