Optical frequency comb generation from a monolithic microresonator

By P. Del’Haye, A. Schliesser, O. Arcizet, T. Wilken, Ronald Holzwarth, Tobias J. Kippenberg. Nature, 2007

2,026 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Optical frequency combs provide equidistant frequency markers in the infrared, visible and ultraviolet, and can be used to link an unknown optical frequency to a radio or microwave frequency reference. Since their inception, frequency combs have triggered substantial advances in optical frequency metrology and precision measurements and in applications such as broadband laser-based gas sensing and molecular fingerprinting. Early work generated frequency combs by intra-cavity phase modulation; subsequently, frequency combs have been generated using the comb-like mode structure of mode-locked lasers, whose repetition rate and carrier envelope phase can be stabilized. Here we report a substantially different approach to comb generation, in which equally spaced frequency markers are produced by the interaction between a continuous-wave pump laser of a known frequency with the modes of a monolithic ultra-high-Q microresonator via the Kerr nonlinearity. The intrinsically broadband nature of parametric gain makes it possible to generate discrete comb modes over a 500-nm-wide span (∼70 THz) around 1,550 nm without relying on any external spectral broadening. Optical-heterodyne-based measurements reveal that cascaded parametric interactions give rise to an optical frequency comb, overcoming passive cavity dispersion. The uniformity of the mode spacing has been verified to within a relative experimental precision of 7.3 × 10-18. In contrast to femtosecond mode-locked lasers, this work represents a step towards a monolithic optical frequency comb generator, allowing considerable reduction in size, complexity and power consumption. Moreover, the approach can operate at previously unattainable repetition rates, exceeding 100 GHz, which are useful in applications where access to individual comb modes is required, such as optical waveform synthesis, high capacity telecommunications or astrophysical spectrometer calibration.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7a981fb4f03c3c1f119b3dccfc4595e52b6f10a2

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Citations in the corpus

Breaking the Loss Limitation of On-chip High-confinement Resonators (2016, background): “In addition, this threshold power is close to the lowest threshold reported in ultra-high Q microresonators such as CaF2 [55] and flowable silica glass [4].”
On-Chip Optical Squeezing (2013, background): “For example, FWM oscillation has been reported in silica [40], crystalline fluorides [41], hydex [42], aluminum nitride [43], and diamond [44].”
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): “Micro-combs [1-4] - optical frequency combs generated by integrated micro-cavity resonators – offer the full potential of their bulk counterparts [5,6], but in an integrated footprint.”
Phase-coherent microwave-to-optical link with a self-referenced microcomb (2016, background): “fpump2 = fceoFC + m × frepFC + fbeat (2)”
Dissipative Kerr solitons in optical microresonators (2018, background): “recently been discovered (9) as states in Kerr frequency combs (7).”
Kerr optical frequency combs: theory, applications and perspectives (2016, background): “This appelation is an obvious reference to their peculiar geometrical form, and these resonators are manufactured using fused silica [6].”