Thermal noise reduction in soliton microcombs via laser self-cooling

TL;DR

This paper presents a straightforward laser cooling method to significantly reduce thermal noise in soliton microcombs, enhancing their stability and potential for practical applications.

Contribution

The authors introduce a novel laser self-cooling technique that mitigates thermal noise in soliton microcombs by exciting two neighboring cavity modes with a single pump laser.

Findings

Thermal noise in soliton microcombs can be effectively reduced using laser self-cooling.

The method involves exciting two cavity modes with different detunings using the same pump laser.

Thermal noise mitigation improves the coherence and stability of soliton microcombs.

Abstract

Thermal noise usually dominates the low-frequency region of the optical phase noise of soliton microcombs, leading to decoherence and limiting many aspects of applications. In this work, we demonstrate a simple and reliable way to mitigate this noise by laser cooling with the pump laser. The key is rendering the pump laser to simultaneously excite two neighboring cavity modes from different families that are respectively red and blue detuned, one for soliton generation and the other one for laser cooling.