No Arabic abstract
We study the properties of a soliton crystal, an bound state of several optical pulses that propagate with a fixed temporal separation through the optical fibres of the proposed approach for generation of optical frequency combs (OFC) for astronomical spectrograph calibration. This approach - also being suitable for subpicosecond pulse generation for other applications - consists of a conventional single-mode fibre and a suitably pumped Erbium-doped fibre. Two continuous-wave lasers are used as light source. The soliton crystal arises out of the initial deeply modulated laser field at low input powers; for higher input powers, it dissolves into free solitons. We study the soliton crystal build-up in the first fibre stage with respect to different fibre parameters (group-velocity dispersion, nonlinearity, and optical losses) and to the light source characteristics (laser frequency separation and intensity difference). We show that the soliton crystal can be described by two quantities, its fundamental frequency and the laser power-threshold at which the crystal dissolves into free solitons. The soliton crystal exhibits features of a linear and nonlinear optical pattern at the same time and is insensitive to the initial laser power fluctuations. We perform our studies using the numerical technique called Soliton Radiation Beat Analysis.
Optical frequency combs (OFCs), consisting of a set of phase locked equally spaced laser frequency lines, have enabled a great leap in precision spectroscopy and metrology since seminal works of Hansch et al. . Nowadays, OFCs are cornerstones of a wealth of further applications ranging from chemistry and biology to astrophysics and including molecular fingerprinting and LIDARs among others. Driven passive optical resonators constitute the ideal platform for OFCs generation in terms of compactness and low energy footprint. We propose here a new technique for generation of OFCs with tuneable repetition rate in externally driven optical resonators based on the gain-through-filtering process, a simple and elegant method, due to an asymmetric spectral filtering on one side of the pump wave. We demonstrate a proof-of-concept experimental result in a fibre resonator, pioneering a new technique that does not require specific engineering of the resonator dispersion to generate frequency agile OFCs.
We present a novel compact dual-comb source based on a monolithic optical crystalline MgF$_2$ multi-resonator stack. The coherent soliton combs generated in two microresonators of the stack with the repetition rate of 12.1 GHz and difference of 1.62 MHz provided after heterodyning a 300 MHz wide radio-frequency comb. Analogous system can be used for dual-comb spectroscopy, coherent LIDAR applications and massively parallel optical communications.
We present a stability analysis of the Lugiato-Lefever model for Kerr optical frequency combs in whispering gallery mode resonators pumped in the anomalous dispersion regime. This article is the second part of a research work whose first part was devoted to the regime of normal dispersion, and was presented in ref. cite{Part_I}. The case of anomalous dispersion is indeed the most interesting from the theoretical point of view, because of the considerable variety of dynamical behaviors that can be observed. From a technological point of view, it is also the most relevant because it corresponds to the regime where Kerr combs are predominantly generated, studied, and used for different applications. In this article, we analyze the connection between the spatial patterns and the bifurcation structure of the eigenvalues associated to the various equilibria of the system. The bifurcation map evidences a considerable richness from a dynamical standpoint. We study in detail the emergence of super- and sub-critical Turing patterns in the system. We determine the areas were bright isolated cavity solitons emerge, and we show that soliton molecules can emerge as well. Very complex temporal patterns can actually be observed in the system, where solitons (or soliton complexes) co-exist with or without mutual interactions. Our investigations also unveil the mechanism leading to the phenomenon of breathing solitons. Two routes to chaos in the system are identified, namely a route via the so called secondary combs, and another via soliton breathers. The Kerr combs corresponding to all these temporal patterns are analyzed in detail, and a discussion is led about the possibility to gain synthetic comprehension of the observed spectra out of the dynamical complexity of the system.
We raise a detuning-dependent loss mechanism to describe the soliton formation dynamics when the lumped filtering operation is manipulated in anomalous group velocity dispersion regime, using stability analysis of generalized Lugiato-Lefever equation.
There are several mechanisms by which the frequency spectrum of a laser broadens when it propagates at near-relativistic-intensity in tenuous plasma. Focusing on one dimensional effects, we identify two strong optical nonlinearities, namely, four-wave mixing (FWM) and forward Raman scattering (FRS), for creating octave-wide spectra. FWM dominates the interaction when the laser pulse is short and intense; Its combination with phase modulation produces a symmetrically broadened supercontinuum. FRS dominates when the laser pulse is long and relatively weak; It broadens the laser spectrum mainly towards lower frequencies and produces a frequency comb. The creation of the supercontinuum and frequency combs only frequency modulates, but does not compress, the laser pulse.