Experimental demonstration of spontaneous chirality in a nonlinear microresonator

Abstract

Chirality is an important concept that describes the asymmetry property of a system, which usually emerges spontaneously due to mirror symmetry breaking. Such spontaneous chirality manifests predominantly as parity breaking in modern physics, which has been studied extensively, for instance, in Higgs physics, double-well Bose-Einstein condensates, topological insulators and superconductors. In the optical domain, spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking has been elusive experimentally, especially for micro- and nano-photonics which demands multiple identical subsystems, such as photonic nanocavities, meta-molecules and other dual-core settings. Here, for the first time, we observe spontaneous emergence of a chiral field in a single ultrahigh-Q whispering- gallery microresonator. This counter-intuitive effect arises due to the inherent Kerr nonlinearity-modulated coupling between clockwise (CW) and counterclockwise (CCW) propagating waves. At an ultra-weak input threshold of a few hundred microwatts, the initial chiral symmetry is broken spontaneously, and the CW-to-CCW output ratio reaches 20:1. The spontaneous chirality in microresonator holds great potential in studies of fundamental physics and applied photonic devices.

6 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (13)

• Optomechanical second-order sidebands and group delays in a Kerr resonator
• A hierarchy of coupled mode and envelope models for bi-directional microresonators with Kerr nonlinearity
• Photon blockade in non-Hermitian optomechanical systems with nonreciprocal couplings
• Kerr-Nonlinearity-Induced Mode-Splitting in Optical Microresonators
• Dynamic Nonreciprocity with a Kerr Nonlinear Resonator
• Optomechanical second-order sidebands and group delays in a spinning resonator with parametric amplifier and non-Markovian effects
• Soliton blockade in bidirectional microresonators
• Experimental observation of spontaneous symmetry breaking in a quantum phase transition
• Condensation of Thresholds in Multimode Microlasers
• Arbitrary function resonance tuner of the optical microcavity with sub-MHz resolution
• Reversible optical isolators and quasi-circulators using a magneto-optical Fabry-Pérot cavity
• Controlling microresonator solitons with the counter-propagating pump
• Nonlinear topological symmetry protection in a dissipative system