Abstract
Kerr soliton microcombs have recently emerged as a prominent topic in integrated photonics and have enabled new horizons for optical frequency metrology. Kerr soliton microcombs, as the name suggests, are based on high-order cubic optical nonlinearity. It is desirable to exploit quadratic photonic materials, namely Pockels materials, for soliton generation and on-chip implementation of 1f–2f comb self-referencing. Such quadratically driven solitons have been proposed theoretically, but have not yet been observed in a nanophotonic platform, despite recent progress in quadratic comb generation in free-space and crystalline resonators. Here, we report photonic-chip-based Pockels microcomb solitons driven by three-wave mixing in an aluminium nitride microring resonator. In contrast to typical Kerr solitons, the Pockels soliton features unity soliton generation fidelity, two-by-two evolution of multi-soliton states, favourable tuning dynamics and high pump-to-soliton conversion efficiency.
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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 upon reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
This work is supported by DARPA SCOUT (W31P4Q-15-1-0006). H.X.T. acknowledges support from DARPA’s ACES programmes as part of the Draper-NIST collaboration (HR0011-16-C-0118) and a NSF EFRI grant (EFMA-1640959), as well as from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. We thank Y. Sun, S. Reinhart, K. Woods and M. Rooks for assistance with device fabrication.
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A.W.B. and H.X.T. conceived the experimental design. A.W.B. performed device fabrication, measurements and data analysis, with assistance from X.L., Z.G. and J.B.S. M.L. and C.-L.Z. performed numerical simulations and provided theoretical support. A.W.B. and H.X.T. wrote the manuscript, with input from all other authors. H.X.T. supervised the project.
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Supplementary Figs. 1–4 and Notes 1–3.
Supplementary Video 1
Evolution of the Pockels soliton from the numerical simulation.
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Bruch, A.W., Liu, X., Gong, Z. et al. Pockels soliton microcomb. Nat. Photonics 15, 21–27 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-020-00704-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-020-00704-8
