Non-Hermitian singularities induced single-mode depletion and soliton formation in microresonators

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a novel on-chip method to selectively deplete a single resonance in microring resonators using non-Hermitian singularities, enabling controlled soliton formation and mode manipulation.

Contribution

It introduces a feasible platform leveraging non-Hermitian singularities for on-chip single resonance depletion without affecting dispersion or quality factor.

Findings

Experimental evidence of modulation instability and soliton generation

Selective resonance depletion achieved via non-Hermitian singularities

Applicable in microwave photonics, quantum optics, and ultrafast optics

Abstract

On-chip manipulation of single resonance over broad background comb spectra of microring resonators is indispensable, ranging from tailoring laser emission, optical signal processing to non-classical light generation, yet challenging without scarifying the quality factor or inducing additional dispersive effects. Here, we propose an experimentally feasible platform to realize on-chip selective depletion of single resonance in microring with decoupled dispersion and dissipation, which are usually entangled by Kramer-Kroning relation. Thanks to the existence of non-Hermitian singularity, unsplit but significantly increased dissipation of the selected resonance is achieved due to the simultaneous collapse of eigenvalues and eigenvectors, fitting elegantly the requirement of pure single-mode depletion. With delicate yet experimentally feasible parameters, we show explicit evidence of modulation instability as well as deterministic single soliton generation in microresonators induced by depletion in normal and anomalous dispersion regime, respectively. Our findings connect non-Hermitian singularities to wide range of applications associated with selective single mode manipulation in microwave photonics, quantum optics, ultrafast optics and beyond.