Spontaneous Pulse Formation in Edge-Less Photonic Crystal Resonators

Abstract

Complex systems are a proving ground for fundamental interactions between components and their collective emergent phenomena. Through intricate design, integrated photonics offers intriguing nonlinear interactions that create new patterns of light. In particular, the canonical Kerr-nonlinear resonator becomes unstable with a sufficiently intense traveling-wave excitation, yielding instead a Turing pattern composed of a few interfering waves. These resonators also support the localized soliton pulse as a separate nonlinear stationary state. Kerr solitons are remarkably versatile for applications, but they cannot emerge from constant excitation. Here, we explore an edge-less photonic-crystal resonator (PhCR) that enables spontaneous formation of a soliton pulse in place of the Turing pattern. We design a PhCR in the regime of single-azimuthal-mode engineering to re-balance Kerr-nonlinear frequency shifts in favor of the soliton state, commensurate with how group-velocity dispersion balances nonlinearity. Our experiments establish PhCR solitons as mode-locked pulses by way of ultraprecise optical-frequency measurements, and we characterize their fundamental properties. Our work shows that sub-wavelength nanophotonic design expands the palette for nonlinear engineering of light.

main text 6 pages, 4 figures; supplemental 4 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Microresonator Soliton Dual-Comb Spectroscopy
• Integrated turnkey soliton microcombs operated at CMOS frequencies
• Frequency combs and platicons in optical microresonators with normal GVD
• Bringing short-lived dissipative Kerr soliton states in microresonators into a steady state
• Ultralow mode-volume photonic crystal nanobeam cavities for high efficiency coupling to individual carbon nanotube emitters
• Selective engineering of cavity resonance for frequency matching in optical parametric processes

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