Inter-mode breather solitons in optical microresonators

Abstract

The observation of temporal dissipative Kerr solitons in optical microresonators provides, on the applied side, compact sources of coherent optical frequency combs that have already been applied in coherent communications, dual comb spectroscopy and metrology. On a fundamental level, it enables the study of soliton physics in driven nonlinear cavities. Microresonators are commonly multimode and, as a result, inter-mode interactions inherently occur among mode families - a condition referred to as "avoided mode crossings". Avoided mode crossings can cause soliton decay, but can also modify the soliton spectrum, leading to e.g. the formation of dispersive wave and inducing a spectral recoil. Yet, to date, the entailing temporal soliton dynamics from inter-mode interactions has rarely been studied, but is critical to understand regimes of soliton-stability. Here we report the discovery of an inter-mode breather soliton. Such breathing dynamics occurs within a laser detuning range where conventionally stationary dissipative solitons are expected. We demonstrate experimentally the phenomenon in two microresonator platforms (crystalline magnesium fluoride and photonic chip-based silicon nitride microresonators), and theoretically describe the dynamics based on a pair of coupled Lugiato-Lefever equations. We demonstrate experimentally that the breathing is associated with a periodic energy exchange between the soliton and another optical mode family. We further show that inter-mode interactions can be modeled by a response function acting on dissipative solitons. The observation of breathing dynamics in the conventionally stable soliton regime is critical to applications, ranging from low-noise microwave generation, frequency synthesis to spectroscopy. On a fundamental level, our results provide new understandings of the rich dissipative soliton dynamics in multimode nonlinear cavities.

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Cited by in corpus (13)

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• Emerging material systems for integrated optical Kerr frequency combs
• Spectral purification of microwave signals with disciplined dissipative Kerr solitons
• Kerr breather-soliton time crystals
• Dark breathers in a normal dispersion optical microresonator
• Coupled-mode theory for microresonators with quadratic nonlinearity
• Optical microcombs in whispering gallery mode crystalline resonators with dispersive intermode interactions
• Dynamics of nonlinear-Schroedinger breathers in a potential trap
• Slow-light frequency combs and dissipative Kerr solitons in coupled-cavity waveguides
• Optimal control for feedback cooling in cavityless levitated optomechanics
• Temporal dissipative structures in optical Kerr resonators with transient loss fluctuation
• Stationary States and Instabilities of a Mobius Fibre Resonator
• Walk-off induced dissipative breathers and dissipative breather gas in microresonators