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Temporal walk-off induced dissipative quadratic solitons

Nature Photonics volume 16, pages 162–168 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

A plethora of applications have recently motivated extensive efforts regarding the generation of Kerr solitons and coherent frequency combs. However, the Kerr (cubic) nonlinearity is inherently weak. By contrast, strong quadratic nonlinearity in optical resonators is expected to provide a promising alternative means for soliton formation. Here we demonstrate dissipative quadratic soliton formation via non-stationary optical parametric amplification in the presence of pronounced temporal walk-off between pump and signal, leading to half-harmonic generation accompanied by a substantial pulse compression (exceeding a factor of 40) supported at low pump pulse energies (~4 pJ). The quadratic soliton forms in a low-finesse cavity in both normal and anomalous dispersion regimes. We present a route to considerably improve the performance of the demonstrated quadratic soliton when extended to an integrated platform to realize highly efficient extreme pulse compression, leading to the formation of few-cycle soliton pulses starting from ultra-low-energy picosecond-scale pump pulses.

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Fig. 1: Walk-off-induced quadratic soliton formation process.
Fig. 2: Cavity detuning dependence of doubly-resonant OPO and its impact on synchronization.
Fig. 3: Spectral and temporal characteristics of the quadratic soliton.
Fig. 4: Soliton and box-pulse regimes.
Fig. 5: Dispersion engineering and efficient half-harmonic soliton pulse compression.
Fig. 6: Comparison of existing approaches to quadratic and cubic nonlinearity-mediated pulse compression.

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Data availability

The data that support the plots within this paper are available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.17040335.

Code availability

The codes that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge support from AFOSR award no. FA9550-20-1-0040 (to A.M.), NSF grant no. 1846273 (to A.M.) and NASA (to A.M.). We also thank NTT Research for their financial and technical support. We thank R. Gray for his valuable input.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Arkadev Roy, Rajveer Nehra, Saman Jahani, Luis Ledezma & Alireza Marandi

  2. Edward L. Ginzton Laboratory, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Carsten Langrock & Martin Fejer

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Contributions

A.R. performed the experiments with help from R.N. A.R. and L.L. developed the theory and performed the numerical simulations. C.L. fabricated the PPLN waveguide used in the experiment, with supervision from M.F. All authors contributed to analysis of the results. A.R. and A.M. wrote the manuscript with input from all authors. A.M. supervised the project.

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Correspondence to Alireza Marandi.

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Supplementary Table 1, Figs. 1–16 and references.

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Roy, A., Nehra, R., Jahani, S. et al. Temporal walk-off induced dissipative quadratic solitons. Nat. Photon. 16, 162–168 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-021-00942-4

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