Kerr-Induced Synchronization of a Cavity Soliton to an Optical Reference

Abstract

The phase-coherent frequency division of a stabilized optical reference laser to the microwave domain is made possible by optical frequency combs (OFCs). Fundamentally, OFC-based clockworks rely on the ability to lock one comb tooth to this reference laser, which probes a stable atomic transition. The active feedback process associated with locking the comb tooth to the reference laser introduces complexity, bandwidth, and power requirements that, in the context of chip-scale technologies, complicate the push to fully integrate OFC photonics and electronics for fieldable clock applications. Here, we demonstrate passive, electronics-free synchronization of a microresonator-based dissipative Kerr soliton (DKS) OFC to a reference laser. We show that the Kerr nonlinearity within the same resonator in which the DKS is generated enables phase locking of the DKS to the externally injected reference. We present a theoretical model to explain this Kerr-induced synchronization (KIS), and find that its predictions for the conditions under which synchronization occur closely match experiments based on a chip-integrated, silicon nitride microring resonator. Once synchronized, the reference laser is effectively an OFC tooth, which we show, theoretically and experimentally, enables through its frequency tuning the direct external control of the OFC repetition rate. Finally, we examine the short- and long-term stability of the DKS repetition rate and show that the repetition rate stability is consistent with the frequency division of the expected optical clockwork system.

References in corpus (6)

• Stably accessing octave-spanning microresonator frequency combs in the soliton regime
• pyLLE: a Fast and User Friendly Lugiato-Lefever Equation Solver
• Integrated Buried Heaters for Efficient Spectral Control of Air-Clad Microresonator Frequency Combs
• Dynamics of temporal Kerr cavity solitons in the presence of rapid parameter inhomogeneities: from bichromatic driving to third-order dispersion
• Two-Dimensional Nonlinear Mixing Between a Dissipative Kerr Soliton and Continuous Waves for a Higher-Dimension Frequency Comb
• Efficient Frequency Doubling with Active Stabilization on Chip

Cited by in corpus (11)

• Octave-spanning Kerr soliton frequency combs in dispersion- and dissipation-engineered lithium niobate microresonators
• Optical Kerr soliton microcombs for high bandwidth communications
• Sideband Injection Locking in Microresonator Frequency Combs
• Phase-stabilised self-injection-locked microcomb
• Versatile Optical Frequency Division with Kerr-induced Synchronization at Tunable Microcomb Synthetic Dispersive Waves
• All-Optical Noise Quenching of An Integrated Frequency Comb
• Multi-timescale frequency-phase matching for high-yield nonlinear photonics
• On-chip multi-timescale spatiotemporal optical synchronization
• On-Chip Parametric Synchronization of a Dissipative Kerr Soliton Microcomb
• Broadband Visible Wavelength Microcomb Generation In Silicon Nitride Microrings Through Air-Clad Dispersion Engineering
• All-Optical Azimuthal Trapping of Dissipative Kerr Multi-Solitons for Relative Noise Suppression