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Temporal cavity solitons in one-dimensional Kerr media as bits in an all-optical buffer

Nature Photonics volume 4, pages 471–476 (2010)Cite this article

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Abstract

Temporal cavity solitons are packets of light persisting in a continuously driven nonlinear resonator. They are robust attracting states, readily excited through a phase-insensitive and wavelength-insensitive process. As such, they constitute an ideal support for bits in an optical buffer that would seamlessly combine three critical telecommunication functions, namely all-optical storage, all-optical reshaping and wavelength conversion. Here, with standard silica optical fibres, we report the first experimental observation of temporal cavity solitons. The cavity solitons are 4 ps long and are used to demonstrate storage of a data stream for more than a second. We also observe interactions of close cavity solitons, revealing for our set-up a potential capacity of up to 45,000 bits at 25 Gbit s−1. More fundamentally, cavity solitons are localized dissipative structures. Therefore, given that silica exhibits a pure instantaneous Kerr nonlinearity, our experiment constitutes one of the simplest examples of self-organization phenomena in nonlinear optics.

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Figure 1: Experimental set-up.
Figure 2: Observation of an isolated CS.
Figure 3: The acronym of our institution stored all-optically with CSs.
Figure 4: Experimental observation of the interactions between close CSs.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to A. Mussot and M. Taki from Laboratoire de Physique des Lasers, Atomes et Molécules (PhLAM), Université de Lille 1 (Lille, France) and to T. Sylvestre and J.-M. Merolla, Université de Franche-Comté (Besançon, France) for lending us some experimental parts, as well as to M. Tlidi, Université Libre de Bruxelles (Brussels, Belgium), for fruitful discussions. This work was supported by the Belgian Science Policy Office (BELSPO) Interuniversity Attraction Pole (IAP) programme under grant no. IAP-6/10. F.L. acknowledges the support of the Fonds pour la formation à la Recherche dans l'Industrie et dans l'Agriculture (FRIA) (Belgium). The participation of S.C. to this project was made possible thanks to a Research & Study Leave granted by The University of Auckland and to a visiting fellowship from the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) (Belgium). S.C. and The University of Auckland also provided the high-sampling rate oscilloscope necessary for this project. The work of S.C. is supported by a New Economy Research Fund (NERF) grant from The Foundation for Research, Science and Technology of the New Zealand government.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Service OPERA-photonique, Université libre de Bruxelles (U.L.B.), 50 Avenue F. D. Roosevelt, CP 194/5, Bruxelles, B-1050, Belgium

    François Leo, Pascal Kockaert, Simon-Pierre Gorza, Philippe Emplit & Marc Haelterman

  2. Department of Physics, The University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand

    Stéphane Coen

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Contributions

F.L. performed the experiments, starting with the set-up built by S.C. for other studies, and analysed the results. S.C. helped analyse the results, supervised the experiments, and wrote the paper. Overall, F.L. and S.C. contributed equally to this work. P.K. provided day-to-day support both in the laboratory and on theoretical aspects. S.-P.G. helped with the autocorrelation measurement and in the analysis of the spectral fringes of pairs of CSs. Ph.E. is the group leader and obtained funding for this work. M.H. supervised the overall project.

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Correspondence to François Leo.

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Leo, F., Coen, S., Kockaert, P. et al. Temporal cavity solitons in one-dimensional Kerr media as bits in an all-optical buffer. Nature Photon 4, 471–476 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2010.120

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