Manipulation and control of temporal cavity solitons with trapping potential

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how trapping potentials can be used to control the properties of temporal cavity solitons, including their position, speed, and frequency, with theoretical and experimental insights into their stability and spectral shifts.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to manipulate cavity solitons using trapping potentials, revealing fundamental spectral limitations and enabling enhanced control for practical applications.

Findings

Controlled spectral shifts of solitons up to theoretical limits

Observation of Bloch oscillations of Kelly sidebands

Potential to cancel Raman-induced frequency shifts

Abstract

Temporal cavity solitons (CSs) are stable, localized particle-like objects in the form of optical pulses that circulate indefinitely in coherently driven nonlinear resonators. In the spectral domain, they form highly coherent frequency combs. Owing to their remarkable stability, they are attracting attention for applications in sensing, metrology, or optical signal synthesis. In this work, we report on the dynamics of CSs interacting with a trapping potential. We demonstrate that this interaction provides a powerful means to control their properties such as position, speed, and central frequency. Our theoretical analysis predicts fundamental limitations on the spectral shift of CSs relative to the driving frequency. Specifically, it reveals that within a broad range of detunings, frequency-shifted CSs encounter destabilization through a Hopf bifurcation. Moreover, we find that with periodic potentials, the Kelly sidebands emitted by trapped solitons undergo Bloch oscillations. In our experiments, we use an intracavity phase modulator to create the equivalent of an external real potential. We observe stable blue- and red- shifted solitons up to a limit close to our theoretical predictions. We then show theoretically and experimentally that this unprecedented level of control over the CS spectrum can be leveraged to cancel the Raman-induced self-frequency shift and even to stabilize CSs beyond the limitation imposed by stimulated Raman scattering. Our results provide valuable insights for applications requiring robust and potentially rapid tunable control over the cavity soliton properties.