No Arabic abstract
Dissipative Kerr-microresonator soliton combs (hereafter called soliton combs) are promising to realize chip scale integration of full soliton comb systems providing high precision, broad spectral coverage and a coherent link to the micro/mm/THz domain with diverse applications coming on line all the time. However, the large soliton comb spacing hampers some applications. For example, for spectroscopic applications, there are simply not enough comb lines available to sufficiently cover almost any relevant absorption features. Here, we overcome this limitation by scanning the comb mode spacing by employing PDH locking and a microheater on the microresonator, showing continuous scanning of the soliton comb modes across nearly the full FSR of the microresonator without losing soliton operation, while spectral features with a bandwidth of as small of 5 MHz are resolved. Thus, comb mode scanning allows to cover the whole comb mode spectrum of tens of THz bandwidth with only one chip-scale comb.
We present a chip-scale scanning dual-comb spectroscopy (SDCS) approach for broadband ultrahigh-resolution spectral acquisition. SDCS uses Si3N4 microring resonators that generate two single soliton micro-combs spanning 37 THz (300 nm) on the same chip from a single 1550-nm laser, forming a high-mutual-coherence dual-comb. We realize continuous tuning of the dual-comb system over the entire optical span of 37.5 THz with high precision using integrated microheater-based wavelength trackers. This continuous wavelength tuning is enabled by simultaneous tuning of the laser frequency and the two single soliton micro-combs over a full free spectral range of the microrings. We measure the SDCS resolution to be 319+-4.6 kHz. Using this SDCS system, we perform the molecular absorption spectroscopy of H13C14N over its 2.3 THz (18 nm)-wide overtone band, and show that the massively parallel heterodyning offered by the dual-comb expands the effective spectroscopic tuning speed of the laser by one order of magnitude. Our chip-scale SDCS opens the door to broadband spectrometry and massively parallel sensing with ultrahigh spectral resolution.
We demonstrate a photonic radio frequency (RF) transversal filter based on an integrated optical micro-comb source featuring a record low free spectral range of 49 GHz yielding 80 micro-comb lines across the C-band. This record-high number of taps, or wavelengths for the transversal filter results in significantly increased performance including a QRF factor more than four times higher than previous results. Further, by employing both positive and negative taps, an improved out-of-band rejection of up to 48.9 dB is demonstrated using Gaussian apodization, together with a tunable centre frequency covering the RF spectra range, with a widely tunable 3-dB bandwidth and versatile dynamically adjustable filter shapes. Our experimental results match well with theory, showing that our transversal filter is a competitive solution to implement advanced adaptive RF filters with broad operational bandwidths, high frequency selectivity, high reconfigurability, and potentially reduced cost and footprint. This approach is promising for applications in modern radar and communications systems.
We demonstrate fiber mode-locked dual frequency comb spectroscopy for broadband, high resolution measurements in a rapid compression machine (RCM). We apply an apodization technique to improve the short-term signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR), which enables broadband spectroscopy at combustion-relevant timescales. We measure the absorption on 24345 individual wavelength elements (comb teeth) between 5967 and 6133 cm-1 at 704 microsecond time resolution during a 12-ms compression of a CH4-N2 mixture. We discuss the effect of the apodization technique on the absorption spectra, and apply an identical effect to the spectral model during fitting to recover the mixture temperature. The fitted temperature is compared against an adiabatic model, and found to be in good agreement with expected trends. This work demonstrates the potential of DCS to be used as an in situ diagnostic tool for broadband, high resolution, measurements in engine-like environments.
Dissipative solitons are stable localized coherent structures with linear frequency chirp generated in normal-dispersion mode-locked lasers. The soliton energy in fiber lasers is limited by the Raman effect, but implementation of intracavity feedback for the Stokes wave enables synchronous generation of a coherent Raman dissipative soliton. Here we demonstrate a new approach for generating chirped pulses at new wavelengths by mixing in a highly-nonlinear fiber of two frequency-shifted dissipative solitons, as well as cascaded generation of their clones forming a dissipative soliton comb in the frequency domain. We observed up to eight equidistant components in a 400-nm interval demonstrating compressibility from ~10 ps to ~300 fs. This approach, being different from traditional frequency combs, can inspire new developments in fundamental science and applications.
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.