Self-organization of cavity solitons in Brillouin-Kerr ring resonators

TL;DR

This paper explores the formation and stability of cavity solitons in Brillouin-Kerr ring resonators, demonstrating their pattern formation, long-range locking, and providing a theoretical model that aligns with experimental results, advancing hybrid optical frequency comb research.

Contribution

It introduces a unified mean-field model for coupled waves in Brillouin-Kerr resonators and reveals stable soliton patterns driven by Brillouin and Kerr effects.

Findings

Demonstrated stable cavity soliton patterns at twice the Brillouin shift.

Showed long-range locking mechanism mediated by acoustic oscillations.

Validated the mean-field model with experimental data.

Abstract

We report on the interaction between stimulated Brillouin scattering and temporal cavity solitons in doubly resonant ring resonators. Our experiments are performed in coherently driven passive optical-fibre resonators. We demonstrate that the interplay between four-wave mixing and cascade Brillouin lasing spontaneously generates patterns of CSs on a temporal grid at twice the Brillouin-shift. These patterns are shown to be highly stable owing to a long-range locking mechanism mediated by the acoustic oscillation generated by the solitons. We introduce a unified mean-field model of the cavity to describe the dynamics between the coupled forward and backward waves under coherent driving. This model reproduces very well the experiments and explains the paracrystalline structures of the soliton pattern. Our findings significantly advance the understanding of hybrid Brillouin-Kerr optical frequency combs.