4-Dimensional Symmetry Breaking of Light in Kerr Ring Resonators

Abstract

Symmetry breaking of light states is of interest for the understanding of nonlinear optics, photonic circuits, telecom applications and optical pulse generation. Here we demonstrate 4-fold symmetry breaking of the resonances of ring resonators with Kerr nonlinearity. This symmetry breaking naturally occurs in a resonator with bidirectionally propagating light with orthogonal polarization components. The four circulating field components are shown to exhibit multiple and, nested and isolated, spontaneous symmetry breaking bifurcations, and are also capable of complex oscillatory dynamics -such as four-field self-switching, and unusual temporal cavity soliton-like dynamics on time scales of multiple round-trip times, with extended delays between subsequent generations.

4-Field spontaneous symmetry breakings in photonic molecules

“…SSBs in Kerr-resonators have been observed between counter propagating fields [3][4][5][6] and two orthogonal polarization components [7] of light. Recently, the possibility of 4-field SSB in microresonators has been predicted [8]. In this work, we show that 4-field SSBs are also viable in two different arrangements of photonic molecules formed by two identical microresonators having different inter-resonator coupling mechanisms.…”

Symmetry Broken Vectorial Kerr Frequency Combs from Fabry-Pérot Resonators

“…Comparing it with the equations of Cole et al [24,26], we see that the effects of the polarisation components cause not only additional cross-phase modulation terms (and their averages) but also a further additional term, the final term of Eq. ( 1), which is caused by an energy exchange between the two circular components of each beam [22,29]. We note that, if so desired, one may transition Eq.…”

“…where E in is the input pump, θ the cavity detuning, η controls the type of dispersion (with its value ±1 referring to normal or anomalous dispersion, respectively), t and τ are both temporal variables but on relative slow and fast time-scales, respectively [28], and A and B control the strengths of self-and cross-phase modulation effects, [11,22].…”

“…In this work we add dispersion and consider the reflective boundary conditions, the input pump, and the cavity detuning and other losses, all of which are inherent to a Fabry-Pérot resonator [24,36]. Then we generalise the equations for various self-(A) and cross-phase (B) modulation strengths, [11,22], resulting in the following Eqs. (8)(9)(10)(11).…”

"Talking" Vector Solitons and their Polarization Conformity in Fabry-Pérot Cavities

“…The SSB of light in Kerr resonators has seen a flurry of study and interest in the past half-decade, being predicted and observed for systems with counter-propagating light components [1][2][3], for orthogonally polarized light components [4,5], and also very recently for systems combining both counter-propogating light and orthogonal polarizations components together [6] and containing twinresonator photonic isomers [7].…”