All Optical Stabilization of a Soliton Frequency Comb in a Crystalline Microresonator

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel all optical method to stabilize a soliton-based microresonator frequency comb by controlling the repetition rate through thermal heating and stabilizing the offset frequency with a reference comb.

Contribution

The authors introduce a new all optical stabilization technique for microresonator frequency combs, enabling low noise control of repetition rate and offset frequency.

Findings

Successful stabilization of the soliton frequency comb's repetition rate.

Effective control of the offset frequency using a reference optical frequency comb.

Demonstration of low noise stabilization suitable for self-referenced applications.

Abstract

Microresonator based optical frequency combs (MFC) have demonstrated promise in extending the capabilities of optical frequency combs. Here we demonstrate all optical stabilization of a low noise temporal soliton based MFC in a crystalline resonator via a new technique to control the repetition rate. This is accomplished by thermally heating the microresonator with an additional probe laser coupled to an auxiliary optical resonator mode. The offset frequency is controlled by stabilization of the pump laser frequency to a reference optical frequency comb. We analyze the stabilization by performing an out of loop comparison and measure the overlapping Allan deviation. This all optical stabilization technique can prove useful as a low added noise actuator for self-referenced microresonator frequency combs.