Stability and Intrinsic Fluctuations of Dissipative Cavity Solitons in Kerr Frequency Microcombs

Abstract

The generation of dissipative cavity solitons is one of the most intriguing features of microresonator-based Kerr frequency combs, enabling effective mode locking of comb modes and synthesis of ultrafast pulses. With the Lugiato-Lefever model, here, we conduct detailed theoretical investigations on the transient dynamics of dissipative cavity solitons and describe how several intrinsic effects of the Kerr comb disturb the stability of cavity solitons, including soliton breathing, higher order dispersion, dispersive wave emission, and cavity mode coupling. Our results and analysis agree well with recent measurements and provide insight into some as yet unexplained observations.

Breathing dissipative solitons in optical microresonators

“…Despite their apparent simplicity, microresonators possess a rich variety of stable inhomogeneous solutions. As reported both in numerical simulations 7 – 10 and in experiments 2 , 11 – 13 , depending on its dispersion parameters, a resonator can sustain bright dissipative Kerr solitons 2 , 12 , 13 , Turing patterns 14 , soliton crystals 15 or dark pulses (platicons) 11 , 16 . Some of these localised patterns can exhibit a rich panel of dynamical instabilities.…”

Breather soliton dynamics in microresonators

“…Temporal cavity solitons (CSs) are self-localized pulses of light that can be excited in nonlinear optical resonators 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 and have recently attracted significant research interest in the context of microresonator-based frequency comb generation 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 . In contrast, a breather soliton is a nonlinear wave in which energy is localized in space but oscillates in time, or vice versa 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 , and is found in various subfields of natural science, such as solid-state physics, fluid dynamics, plasma physics, chemistry, molecular biology and nonlinear optics 25 . Breather solitons have been recently reported in an optical fibre cavity 20 .…”

“…In this paper, we present a theoretical and experimental study of breather CS's 19 20 21 22 excited in microresonators. This work provides experimental observation and characterization of such dynamic instabilities in optical microresonators 18 20 21 22 23 24 , which constitute a significant contribution toward understanding the universal dynamics of frequency combs based on driven passive resonators and is relevant to a large variety of physical systems for both fundamental and applied interests. We demonstrate the universal nature of such breather solitons in two different material platforms, silicon nitride (Si 3 N 4 ) 9 10 12 13 and silicon (Si) 16 17 .…”

Panoramic-reconstruction temporal imaging for seamless measurements of slowly-evolved femtosecond pulse dynamics

“…For example, studying the dynamics of dissipative Kerr solitons [29][30][31] is of particular interest because of their potential applications in low-phase noise photonic oscillators [32,33], broadband optical frequency synthesizers [34,35], miniaturized optical clockwork [36], and coherent terabit communications [37]. While the soliton generation benefits greatly from the ultrahigh quality factor (Q) of the microresonator, the ultrahigh Q also renders its formation and transition dynamics slowly evolved at a time scale much longer than the cavity roundtrip time [38,39], which causes significant challenges in the experimental real-time observation. Similarly, an optical metrology system that combines the feats of fine temporal resolution and long measurement window is also desired in the study of optical turbulence and laminar-turbulent transition in fibre lasers [40,41], which leads to a better understanding of coherence breakdown in lasers and laser operation in far-from-equilibrium regimes.…”