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Super-efficient temporal solitons in mutually coupled optical cavities

Nature Photonics volume 13, pages 616–622 (2019)Cite this article

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Abstract

A coherently driven Kerr optical cavity is able to sustain dissipative temporal solitons, enabling all-optical data storage buffers and broadband frequency combs. Kerr solitons are balanced through an energy exchange with the pump field. Improving the pump-to-soliton energy conversion is of great importance for practical applications, but remains an outstanding challenge owing to a limited pump–soliton temporal overlap. Here we report the discovery of temporal solitons in mutually coupled cavities instead of a traditional single cavity. A pump recycling strategy is proposed, to greatly improve the power utilization efficiency. Using macroscale optical fibre-ring cavities, which share the same physical model as miniature microresonators, we demonstrate nearly 100% pump recycling and the ability to break the efficiency limit of a single cavity. This study could greatly extend the applications of temporal cavity solitons and provides an attractive platform for exploring the complex nonlinear dynamics in coupled cavity systems.

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Fig. 1: Illustration of soliton generation with pump recycling.
Fig. 2: Dual-coupled optical fibre-ring cavities for studying soliton dynamics.
Fig. 3: Observation of coupled-cavity solitons.
Fig. 4: Soliton characterization in the time domain.
Fig. 5: Soliton existence range.
Fig. 6: Numerically simulated soliton frequency comb generation in mutually coupled optical microresonators assuming no intrinsic losses.

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Data availability

The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank A. M. Weiner, the late M. L. Gorodetsky and F. Leo for discussions, and S. Yang for providing the dispersion compensating fibre. This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant numbers 61690191, 61690192 and 61420106003) and the Beijing Municipal Natural Science Foundation (grant number 4172029).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronic Engineering, Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Xiaoxiao Xue, Xiaoping Zheng & Bingkun Zhou

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  1. Xiaoxiao Xue
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  2. Xiaoping Zheng
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X.X. conceived the idea, performed the experiments and performed the theoretical analysis. X.Z. and B.Z. helped to explain the results. All the authors were involved in discussions and preparation of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Xiaoxiao Xue.

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This file contains more information about the work and Supplementary Figs. 1–9.

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Xue, X., Zheng, X. & Zhou, B. Super-efficient temporal solitons in mutually coupled optical cavities. Nat. Photonics 13, 616–622 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-019-0436-0

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