Thermal control of Kerr microresonator soliton comb via an optical sideband

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a novel thermal control method for Kerr microresonator soliton combs using an optical sideband, simplifying setup and significantly expanding the operational range compared to traditional auxiliary laser techniques.

Contribution

Introducing an optical sideband approach for thermal control of Kerr soliton combs, enabling larger stability range and easier tuning without microheaters or independent lasers.

Findings

Achieved 18 times larger soliton existence range.

Enabled >10 GHz soliton comb scanning without microheaters.

Reduced phase noise and simplified setup.

Abstract

We report the thermal control of a dissipative Kerr microresonator soliton comb via an optical sideband generated from an electro-optic modulator. Same as the previous reports using an independent auxiliary laser, our sideband-based (S-B) auxiliary light also enables to access a stable soliton comb and to reduce the phase noise of the soliton comb, greatly simplifying the setup with an auxiliary laser. More importantly, because of the intrinsically high frequency/phase correlation between the pump and S-B auxiliary light, the detuning between the pump and resonance frequency is automatically almost fixed, allowing the 18 times larger "effective"soliton existence range than the conventional method using an independent auxiliary laser, as well as the scanning of the soliton comb of more than 10 GHz without using microheaters.