Thermo-Optical Chaos and Direct Soliton Generation in Microresonators

Abstract

We investigate, numerically and experimentally, the effect of thermo-optical (TO) chaos on direct soliton generation (DSG) in microresonators. When the pump laser is scanned from blue to red and then stopped at a fixed wavelength, we find that the solitons generated sometimes remain (survive) and sometimes annihilate subsequent to the end of the scan. We refer to the possibility of these different outcomes arising under identical laser scan conditions as coexistence of soliton annihilation and survival. Numerical simulations that include the thermal dynamics show that the coexistence of soliton annihilation and survival is explained by TO chaos accompanying comb generation. The random fluctuations of the cavity resonance occurring under TO chaos are also found to trigger spontaneous soliton generation after the laser scan ends. The coexistence of soliton annihilation and survival as well as spontaneous soliton generation are observed experimentally in a silicon-nitride microresonator. The elucidation of the role of TO chaos provides important insights into the soliton generation dynamics in microresonators, which may eventually facilitate straightforward soliton generation in fully-integrated microresonators.

References in corpus (3)

• Microresonator Soliton Dual-Comb Spectroscopy
• Stably accessing octave-spanning microresonator frequency combs in the soliton regime
• Bringing short-lived dissipative Kerr soliton states in microresonators into a steady state

Cited by in corpus (19)

• Graphene oxide: new opportunities for optoelectronic, electronic and photonic chips
• High performance photonic microwave filters based on a 50GHz optical soliton crystal Kerr micro-comb
• Optical data transmission at 44Tb/s and 10 bits/s/Hz over the C-band with standard fibre and a single micro-comb source
• Sagnac interference in integrated photonics for reflection mirrors, gyroscopes, filters, and wavelength interleavers
• Recent Advances in Laser Self-Injection Locking to High-$Q$ Microresonators
• Directly accessing octave-spanning dissipative Kerr soliton frequency combs in an AlN microring resonator
• Photo-thermal tuning of graphene oxide coated integrated optical waveguides
• Optical-frequency measurements with a Kerr-microcomb and photonic-chip supercontinuum
• Deuterated silicon nitride photonic devices for broadband optical frequency comb generation
• Ultra-high bandwidth fiber-optic data transmission with a single chip source
• Optical data transmission field trial @ 44Tb/s with a 49GHz Kerr soliton crystal microcomb
• Dissipative cnoidal waves (Turing rolls) and the soliton limit in microring resonators
• Thermally Induced Generation of Platicons in Optical Microresonators
• Group-velocity dispersion engineering of tantala integrated photonics
• Deterministic generation of single soliton Kerr frequency comb in microresonators by a single shot pulsed trigger
• Thermal instabilities, frequency comb formation, and temporal oscillations in Kerr microresonators
• Platicon Stability in Hot Cavities
• Graphene oxide 2D films integrated with nanowires and ring resonators for enhanced nonlinear optics
• Thermally accessible broadband soliton microcombs in silicon carbide enabled by dynamic polarization control