| Experimental observation of the 1D Kerr-Type cavity soliton Temporal cavity solitons constitute a remarkable family of light pulses. They don’t spread nor suffer losses and circulate indefinitely, round-trips after round-trips, along the closed path of a nonlinear cavity. To maintain their shape and power, they simply draw some energy from a continuous-wave external beam. Being robust attracting states, they can be easily written by an external pulse and naturally provide reshaping and wavelength conversion functionalities. We experimentally demonstrated the generation of such solitons. We were able to provide precise temporal and spectral characterization along with long-term observation. We also wrote the solitons in pairs and in data streams, showing that our fiber cavity could potentially be used as an all- optical buffer capable of storing 45,000 bits at 25G bits/s. These results have been recently published in Nature Photonics High repetition-rate pulse train generation through dissipative modulation instability in a passive fiber resonator In the early 90’s, a cavity configuration which allows for the generation of stable pulse trains through dis- sipative modulational instability was proposed. The experimental implementation of the so-called MI laser was demonstrated a few years later. Although the ideal parameters for the generation of a pulse train with a repetition rate in the THz range are easily deduced from the theory, no realization in that frequency range has been reported due to practical issues. Thanks to the tuning of the overall cavity dispersion based on the use of special fibers, we recently demonstrated the generation of a 1.6 THz repetition-rate optical pulse-train. Theoretical and experimental study of nonlinear symmetry breaking induced by the order dispersion in a passive fiber resonator In the regime of dissipative modulational instability, the repetition-rates of the generated pulse train can be tuned by changing the group-velocity dispersion (GVD) of the fiber. To reach the THz range, one has to drastically reduced the total GVD in the cavity. In that case, the next order of dispersion has to be included in the theoretical model describing the evolution of the intracavity field (here the mean field model). The third-order dispersion induces a drift of the pattern and an asymmetry in the spectrum. Both these effects can be precisely calculated by a multi-scale model describing the field evolution above threshold. This theoretical work has been confirmed by experimental measurements of the spectral asymmetry. |
