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Dissipative Kerr solitons in semiconductor ring lasers

Nature Photonics volume 16, pages 142–147 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Dissipative Kerr solitons are self-organized optical waves arising from the interplay between the Kerr effect and dispersion. They can form in nonlinear microresonators by deliberately tuning the parameters of the external pump laser, which provides the parametric gain for the proliferation of an ultrastable frequency comb. These miniaturized and battery-driven microcombs have become a disruptive technology for precision metrology, broadband telecommunication and ultrafast optical ranging. Here we report the experimental observation of dissipative Kerr solitons generated in a ring cavity with a fast semiconductor gain medium. The moderate quality factor of the ring cavity is compensated by the giant resonant Kerr nonlinearity of a quantum cascade laser, which is more than a million times larger than that in Si3N4. By engineering the dispersion of the cavity, we observe the formation of bright dissipative Kerr solitons in the mid-infrared range. Two independent techniques shed light on the waveform and coherence of the solitons and confirm a reconstructed temporal width of ~3 ps. In addition, background-free 3.7 ps soliton pulses are demonstrated by optically filtering out the dispersive wave. Our results extend the spectral range of soliton microcombs to mid-infrared wavelengths and will lead to integrated, battery-driven and turnkey spectrometers in the molecular fingerprint region.

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Fig. 1: Dissipative Kerr temporal soliton in a ring QCL.
Fig. 2: Frequency characteristics of the ring cavity and the associated soliton state.
Fig. 3: Spectral phases and waveform of QCL solitons.
Fig. 4: Extraction of solitons via optical bandpass filtering.

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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 authors upon reasonable request.

Code availability

The code used for modelling the data is available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank F. Dalmagioni for assisting in performing the simulations shown in Supplementary Section IX. We acknowledge financial support from the Swiss National Science Foundation and Innosuisse in the scope of the CombTrace (no. 20B2-1_176584/1) project and Qombs Project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 820419. We thank Z. Wang for support with the high-reflection coatings of the reference Fabry–Pérot QCLs and M. Bertrand for initial help with device characterization.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Quantum Optoelectronics Group, Institute of Quantum Electronics, ETH Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Bo Meng, Matthew Singleton, Johannes Hillbrand, Martin Franckié, Mattias Beck & Jérôme Faist

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  1. Bo Meng
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Contributions

B.M. initiated the project as well as processed the devices and performed the initial characterization. M.S. and B.M. performed the SWIFTS measurement. J.H. performed the dual-comb characterization. M.F. provided the non-equilibrium Green’s function and LLE simulations. M.B. grew the QCL wafer. J.H., B.M., M.F and J.F. wrote the manuscript and Supplementary Information. J.F. supervised the project. All the authors contributed to analyse and interpret the results.

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Correspondence to Bo Meng or Jérôme Faist.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information Nature Photonics thanks Federico Capasso and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Sections I–XII and Figs. 1–14.

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Meng, B., Singleton, M., Hillbrand, J. et al. Dissipative Kerr solitons in semiconductor ring lasers. Nat. Photon. 16, 142–147 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-021-00927-3

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