The repetition rate of a Kerr comb comprising a single soliton in an anomalous dispersion silicon nitride microcavity is measured as a function of pump frequency tuning. The contributions from the Raman soliton self-frequency shift (SSFS) and from thermal effects are evaluated both experimentally and theoretically; the SSFS is found to dominate the changes in repetition rate. The relationship between the changes in repetition rate and pump frequency detuning is found to be independent of the nonlinearity coefficient and dispersion of the cavity. Modeling of the repetition rate change by using the generalized Lugiato-Lefever equation is discussed; the Kerr shock is found to have only a minor effect on repetition rate for cavity solitons with duration down to ~50 fs.
We demonstrate the generation of counter-rotating cavity solitons in a silicon nitride microresonator using a fixed, single-frequency laser. We demonstrate a dual 3-soliton state with a difference in the repetition rates of the soliton trains that can be tuned by varying the ratio of pump powers in the two directions. Such a system enables a highly compact, tunable dual comb source that can be used for applications such as spectroscopy and distance ranging.
The recent discovery of dissipative Kerr solitons in microresonators has facilitated the development of fully coherent, chip-scale frequency combs. In addition, dark soliton pulses have been observed in microresonators in the normal dispersion regime. Here, we report bound states of mutually trapped dark-bright soliton pairs in a microresonator. The soliton pairs are generated seeding two modes with opposite dispersion but with similar group velocities. One laser operating in the anomalous dispersion regime generates a bright soliton microcomb, while the other laser in the normal dispersion regime creates a dark soliton via Kerr-induced cross-phase modulation with the bright soliton. Numerical simulations agree well with experimental results and reveal a novel mechanism to generate dark soliton pulses. The trapping of dark and bright solitons can lead to light states with the intriguing property of constant output power while spectrally resembling a frequency comb. These results can be of interest for telecommunication systems, frequency comb applications, ultrafast optics and soliton states in atomic physics.
We present the first direct observation of the bound state of multiple dissipative optical solitons in which bond length and bond strength can be individually controlled in a broad range in a regular manner. We have observed experimentally a new type of stable and extremely elastic soliton crystals that can be stretched and compressed many times conserving their structure by adjusting the bond properties in real time in a specially designed passively mode-locked fiber laser incorporating highly asymmetric tunable Mach-Zehnder interferometer. The temporal structure and dynamics of the generated soliton crystals have been studied using an asynchronous optical sampling system with picosecond resolution. We demonstrated that stable and robust soliton crystal can be formed by two types of primitive structures: single dissipative solitons, and(or) pairs of dissipative soliton and pulse with lower amplitude. Continuous stretching and compression of a soliton crystal with extraordinary high ratio of more than 30 has been demonstrated with a smallest recorded separation between pulses as low as 5 ps corresponding to an effective repetition frequency of 200 GHz. Collective pulse dynamics, including soliton crystal self-assembling, cracking and transformation of crystals comprising pulse pairs to the crystals of similar pulses has been observed experimentally.
Fast-responding detector arrays are commonly used for imaging rapidly-changing scenes. Besides array detectors, a single-pixel detector combined with a broadband optical spectrum can also be used for rapid imaging by mapping the spectrum into a spatial coordinate grid and then rapidly measuring the spectrum. Here, optical frequency combs generated from high-$Q$ silica microresonators are used to implement this method. The microcomb is dispersed in two spatial dimensions to measure a test target. The target-encoded spectrum is then measured by multi-heterodyne beating with another microcomb having a slightly different repetition rate, enabling an imaging frame rate up to 200 kHz and fillrates as high as 48 MegaPixels/s. The system is used to monitor the flow of microparticles in a fluid cell. Microcombs in combination with a monolithic waveguide grating array imager could greatly magnify these results by combining the spatial parallelism of detector arrays with spectral parallelism of optics.
Soliton microcombs constitute chip-scale optical frequency combs, and have the potential to impact a myriad of applications from frequency synthesis and telecommunications to astronomy. The requirement on external driving lasers has been significantly relaxed with the demonstration of soliton formation via self-injection locking of the pump laser to the microresonator. Yet to date, the dynamics of this process has not been fully understood. Prior models of self-injection locking were not able to explain sufficiently large detunings, crucial for soliton formation. Here we develop a theoretical model of self-injection locking to a nonlinear microresonator (nonlinear self-injection locking) for the first time and show that self- and cross-phase modulation of the clockwise and counter-clockwise light enables soliton formation. Using an integrated soliton microcomb of directly detectable 30 GHz repetition rate, consisting of a DFB laser self-injection-locked to a Si3N4 microresonator chip, we study the soliton formation dynamics via self-injection locking, as well as the repetition rate evolution, experimentally. We reveal that Kerr nonlinearity in microresonator significantly modifies locking dynamics, making laser emission frequency red detuned. We propose and implement a novel technique for measurements of the nonlinear frequency tuning curve and concurrent observation of microcomb states switching in real time.