Breather soliton dynamics in microresonators

TL;DR

This paper experimentally investigates breather soliton dynamics in microresonators, confirming theoretical models and revealing how breathing frequency depends on pump detuning, advancing understanding of nonlinear wave behavior in optical systems.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental demonstration of breather solitons in silicon nitride and silicon microresonators, validating the stability diagram predicted by the Lugiato-Lefever equation.

Findings

Breather solitons can be excited in silicon nitride and silicon microresonators.

Breathing frequency varies with pump detuning.

Transition from period-1 to period-2 oscillations observed.

Abstract

The generation of temporal cavity solitons in microresonators results in low-noise optical frequency combs which are critical for applications in spectroscopy, astronomy, navigation or telecommunications. Breather solitons also form an important part of many different classes of nonlinear wave systems with a localized temporal structure that exhibits oscillatory behavior. To date, the dynamics of breather solitons in microresonators remains largely unexplored, and its experimental characterization is challenging. Here, we demonstrate the excitation of breather solitons in two different microresonator platforms based on silicon nitride and on silicon. We investigate the dependence of the breathing frequency on pump detuning and observe the transition from period-1 to period-2 oscillation in good agreement with the numerical simulations. Our study presents experimental confirmation of the stability diagram of dissipative cavity solitons predicted by the Lugiato-Lefever equation and is importance to understanding the fundamental dynamical properties of solitons within the larger context of nonlinear science.