Breathing dissipative solitons in optical microresonators

Abstract

Dissipative solitons are self-localised structures resulting from the double balance of dispersion by nonlinearity and dissipation by a driving force arising in numerous systems. In Kerr-nonlinear optical resonators, temporal solitons permit the formation of light pulses in the cavity and the generation of coherent optical frequency combs. Apart from shape-invariant stationary solitons, these systems can support breathing dissipative solitons exhibiting a periodic oscillatory behaviour. Here, we generate and study single and multiple breathing solitons in coherently driven microresonators. We present a deterministic route to induce soliton breathing, allowing a detailed exploration of the breathing dynamics in two microresonator platforms. We measure the relation between the breathing frequency and two control parameters—pump laser power and effective-detuning—and observe transitions to higher periodicity, irregular oscillations and switching, in agreement with numerical predictions. Using a fast detection, we directly observe the spatiotemporal dynamics of individual solitons, which provides evidence of breather synchronisation.

Build‐Up of Dissipative Optical Soliton Molecules via Diverse Soliton Interactions

“…For example, a work showing different build‐up dynamics of soliton molecules in a saturable absorber mode‐locked fibre laser was posted recently . The intermittent‐vibration soliton molecule observed in our work is expected to be observed in a wide range of nonlinear systems, such as, ultrafast Ti: sapphire lasers, passive fibre oscillators, and microresonators . Moreover, our results suggest that the gain/loss dynamics of a laser play an important role in soliton molecule build‐up and thus shall also be considered in future telecommunications when soliton molecules or multiple pulses are used as information bits, because periodic amplification and loss inherently occur in these systems.…”

Optimal control for feedback cooling in cavityless levitated optomechanics

“…The ability to precisely control and cool the motion of mechanical resonators in order to generate quantum states is of great interest for testing fundamental physics, such as investigating the quantum-to-classical transition [1,2]. A wide variety of resonator systems have shown promise for achieving such goals, including membranes [3,4], micro-and nano-resonators [5][6][7][8] and cantilevers [9,10]. Although ground state cooling has been experimentally realized in optomechanical systems [3,4,8], there is an appetite to reach such states in levitated systems.…”

Dynamics of soliton crystals in optical microresonators

“…Third, we experimentally demonstrate the formation of perfect soliton crystal breathers, which correspond to simultaneous oscillations in the amplitude and duration of all DKS pulses forming the PSC state. For this we brought the PSC state to the breathing region (see the route A -C -D, marked red in Fig.4(a)), where the characteristic indicators of the breathing DKS states have been observed, including the triangle-shaped optical spectrum, and the appearance of the narrow breathing tone, whose frequency was close to the estimated effective detuning and was decreasing as the detuning decreased (see Fig.4(d)) [22]. Discussion -We have demonstrated platformindependent on-demand generation of perfect soliton crystals, which essentially represent defect-free soliton lattices.…”