Spontaneous creation and annihilation of temporal cavity solitons in a coherently-driven passive fiber resonator

TL;DR

This paper experimentally demonstrates the spontaneous creation and annihilation of temporal cavity solitons in a macroscopic fiber resonator, revealing real-time dynamics and mechanisms behind soliton disappearance.

Contribution

It provides the first real-time observation of spontaneous soliton dynamics in a macroscopic fiber resonator, contrasting with previous microresonator studies.

Findings

Spontaneous creation of cavity solitons when tuning across resonance

Individual disappearance of solitons during the scan

Experimental results agree with numerical simulations

Abstract

We report on the experimental observation of spontaneous creation and annihilation of temporal cavity solitons (CSs) in a coherently-driven, macroscopic optical fiber resonator. Specifically, we show that CSs are spontaneously created when the frequency of the cavity driving field is tuned across a resonance, and that they can individually disappear at different stages of the scan. In contrast to previous experiments in monolithic microresonators, we are able to identify these dynamics in real time, thanks to the macroscopic dimensions of our resonator. Our experimental observations are in excellent agreement with numerical simulations. We also discuss the mechanisms responsible for the one-by-one disappearance of CSs.