Amplification and phase noise transfer of a Kerr microresonator soliton comb for low phase noise THz generation with a high signal-to-noise ratio

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that optical injection locking can transfer and amplify phase noise in Kerr microresonator soliton combs without degrading signal quality, enabling low phase noise THz wave generation with high SNR.

Contribution

It introduces a method to amplify and transfer phase noise in Kerr combs via optical injection locking without reducing the optical signal-to-noise ratio.

Findings

Optical injection locking faithfully transfers phase noise in Kerr combs.

The method amplifies the comb mode without degrading SNR.

Low residual phase noise enables high-quality THz wave generation.

Abstract

Optical injection locking is implemented to faithfully transfer the phase noise of a dissipative Kerr microresonator soliton comb in addition to the amplification of the Kerr comb. Unlike Er-doped fiber and semiconductor optical amplifiers, the optical injection locking amplifies the comb mode without degrading the optical signal-to-noise ratio. In addition, we show that the residual phase noise of the optical injection locking is sufficiently small to transfer the relative phase noise of comb modes (equivalent to the repetition frequency) of low phase noise Kerr combs, concluding that the optical injection locking of a Kerr comb can be an effective way to generate low phase noise THz waves with a high signal-to-noise ratio through an optical-to-electronic conversion of the Kerr comb.