Harnessing Dispersion in Soliton Microcombs to Mitigate Thermal Noise
arXiv:2006.10907 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.153901
Abstract
We explore intrinsic thermal noise in soliton microcombs, revealing thermodynamic correlations induced by nonlinearity and group-velocity dispersion. A suitable dispersion design gives rise to control over thermal-noise transduction from the environment to a soliton microcomb. We present simulations with the Lugiato-Lefever equation (LLE), including temperature as a stochastic variable. By systematically tuning the dispersion, we suppress repetition-rate frequency fluctuations by up to 50 decibels for different LLE soliton solutions. In an experiment, we observe a measurement-system-limited 15-decibel reduction in the repetition-rate phase noise for various settings of the pump-laser frequency, and our measurements agree with a thermal-noise model. Finally, we compare two octave-spanning soliton microcombs with similar optical spectra and offset frequencies, but with designed differences in dispersion. Remarkably, their thermal-noise-limited carrier-envelope-offset frequency linewidths are 1 MHz and 100 Hz, which demonstrates an unprecedented potential to mitigate thermal noise. Our results guide future soliton-microcomb design for low-noise applications, and, more generally, they illuminate emergent properties of nonlinear, multi-mode optical systems subject to intrinsic fluctuations.
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- Low phase noise THz generation from a fiber-referenced Kerr microresonator soliton comb
- Thermal noise reduction in soliton microcombs via laser self-cooling
- Versatile Optical Frequency Division with Kerr-induced Synchronization at Tunable Microcomb Synthetic Dispersive Waves
- Coherent terahertz radiation with 2.8-octave tunability through chip-scale photomixed microresonator optical parametric oscillation
- Effects of a quiet point on a Kerr microresonator frequency comb
- All-Optical Noise Quenching of An Integrated Frequency Comb
- All-Optical Azimuthal Trapping of Dissipative Kerr Multi-Solitons for Relative Noise Suppression
- Self-cooling, blue-detuned dissipative Kerr microresonator soliton comb
- Frequency combs with multiple offsets in THz-rate microresonators
- Mapping ultrafast timing jitter in dispersion-managed 89 GHz frequency microcombs via self-heterodyne linear interferometry