Published December 23, 2020 | Version Supplemental Material + Published
Journal Article Open

Dirac solitons in optical microresonators

  • 1. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 2. ROR icon MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms
  • 3. ROR icon Apple (United States)

Abstract

Mode-coupling-induced dispersion has been used to engineer microresonators for soliton generation at the edge of the visible band. Here, we show that the optical soliton formed in this way is analogous to optical Bragg solitons and, more generally, to the Dirac soliton in quantum field theory. This optical Dirac soliton is studied theoretically, and a closed-form solution is derived in the corresponding conservative system. Both analytical and numerical solutions show unusual properties, such as polarization twisting and asymmetrical optical spectra. The closed-form solution is also used to study the repetition rate shift in the soliton. An observation of the asymmetrical spectrum is analysed using theory. The properties of Dirac optical solitons in microresonators are important at a fundamental level and provide a road map for soliton microcomb generation in the visible band.

Additional Information

© The Author(s) 2020. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Received 13 August 2020. Revised 16 November 2020. Accepted 18 November 2020. Published 23 December 2020. The authors thank Demetrios Christodoulides and Curtis Menyuk for the helpful discussion and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (FA9550-18-1-0353) for the financial support. The authors gratefully acknowledge the critical support and infrastructure provided by The Kavli Nanoscience Institute at Caltech. Data availability. The data that support the plots within this paper and the other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. Code availability. The code that supports the plots within this paper and the other findings of this study is available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. Author Contributions. H.W. and K.V. conceived the idea of Dirac solitons; H.W. performed the theoretical calculations with assistance from Y.-K.L.; H.W. modelled the designs for wedge resonators; H.W. and L.W. fabricated and characterized the 1550-nm device; S.H.L. fabricated the 778-nm device; D.Y. and B.S. characterized the device and performed the soliton generation experiment; H.W. and L.W. analysed the data with assistance from B.S.; all authors contributed to writing the manuscript. K.V. supervised the project. The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Supplemental Material - 41377_2020_438_MOESM1_ESM.pdf

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Additional details

Identifiers

PMCID
PMC7758338
Eprint ID
107279
Resolver ID
CaltechAUTHORS:20201224-085807891

Funding

Air Force Office of Scientific Research
FA9550-18-1-0353

Dates

Created
2021-01-04
Created from EPrint's datestamp field
Updated
2022-01-06
Created from EPrint's last_modified field

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