Non-Hermitian singularities induced single-mode depletion and soliton formation in microresonators

Abstract

On-chip manipulation of single resonance over broad background comb spectra of microring resonators is indispensable, ranging from tailoring laser emission, optical signal processing to nonclassical light generation, yet challenging without scarifying the quality factor or inducing additional dispersive effects. Here, we propose an experimentally feasible platform to realize on-chip selective depletion of single resonance in microring with decoupled dispersion and dissipation, which are usually entangled by Kramer-Kroning relation. Thanks to the existence of non-Hermitian singularity, unsplit but significantly increased dissipation of the selected resonance is achieved due to the simultaneous collapse of eigenvalues and eigenvectors, fitting elegantly the requirement of pure mode depletion. With delicate yet experimentally feasible parameters, we show explicit evidence of modulation instability as well as deterministic single soliton generation in microresonators induced by depletion in normal and anomalous dispersion regime, respectively. Our findings connect non-Hermitian singularities to wide range of applications associated with selective single mode manipulation in microwave photonics, quantum optics, ultrafast optics and beyond.