Photonic dissipation control for Kerr soliton generation in strongly Raman-active media

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to control energy dissipation in microcavities, enabling on-demand soliton mode-locking or Raman lasing in strongly Raman-active media, thus overcoming challenges posed by stimulated Raman scattering.

Contribution

It presents a novel dissipation control technique to manage Raman lasing thresholds, facilitating stable Kerr soliton generation in crystalline microresonators.

Findings

Dissipation tailoring effectively suppresses unwanted Raman lasing.

Numerical simulations align with experimental results.

The approach enables on-demand soliton mode-locking in lithium niobate resonators.

Abstract

Microcavity solitons enable miniaturized coherent frequency comb sources. However, the formation of microcavity solitons can be disrupted by stimulated Raman scattering (SRS), particularly in the emerging crystalline microcomb materials with high Raman gain. Here, we propose and implement dissipation control---tailoring the energy dissipation of selected cavity modes---to purposely raise/lower the threshold of Raman lasing in a strongly Raman-active lithium niobate microring resonator, and realize on-demand soliton mode-locking or Raman lasing. Numerical simulations are carried out to confirm our analyses and agree well with experiment results. Our work demonstrates an effective approach to address strong SRS for microcavity soliton generation.