Temporal solitons in optical microresonators

By Tobias Herr, Victor Brasch, John D. Jost, C. Wang, N. Kondratiev, Michael L. Gorodetsky, Tobias J. Kippenberg. Nature Photonics, 2012

1,819 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Temporal dissipative solitons in a continuous-wave laser-driven nonlinear optical microresonator were observed. The solitons were generated spontaneously when the laser frequency was tuned through the effective zero detuning point of a high-Q resonance, which led to an effective red-detuned pumping. Transition to soliton states were characterized by discontinuous steps in the resonator transmission. The solitons were stable in the long term and their number could be controlled via pump-laser detuning. These observations are in agreement with numerical simulations and soliton theory. Operating in the single-soliton regime allows the continuous output coupling of a femtosecond pulse train directly from the microresonator. This approach enables ultrashort pulse syntheses in spectral regimes in which broadband laser-gain media and saturable absorbers are not available. In the frequency domain the single-soliton states correspond to low-noise optical frequency combs with smooth spectral envelopes, critical to applications in broadband spectroscopy, telecommunications, astronomy and low noise microwave generation. Temporal dissipative solitons are observed in a nonlinear, high-finesse, optical microresonator driven by a continuous-wave laser. This approach enables ultrashort pulses to be generated in spectral regimes lacking broadband laser gain media and saturable absorbers, making it potentially useful for applications in broadband spectroscopy, telecommunications, astronomy and low-phase-noise microwave generation.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c9e5e66d8c16f503e93d1e4d4d8190ced8824aaa

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Citations in the corpus

Low-loss silicon platform for broadband mid-infrared photonics (2017, neutral): “This is equidistant in frequency be-tween 3 μ m ( 3333 cm − 1 ) and 6 μ m ( 1667 cm − 1 ), which corresponds to an optimal pump wavelength for broadband comb generation spanning this wavelength range [71].”
High-Q silicon nitride microresonators exhibiting low-power frequency comb initiation (2016, background): “Recently, dissipative Kerr solitons have also been demonstrated in MgF2 and Si3N4 optical microresonators [25,26].”
Modelocked mid-infrared frequency combs in a silicon microresonator (2016, positive): “Recently, there have been several dem-onstrations of such mode locking in the near-infrared regime [9,12,24 – 28].”
Soliton crystals in Kerr resonators (2016, background): “a χ(3)-nonlinear medium (here silica).”