Observation of Breathing Dark Pulses in Normal Dispersion Optical Microresonators
Abstract
Breathers are localized waves in nonlinear systems that undergo a periodic variation in time or space. The concept of breathers is useful for describing many nonlinear physical systems including granular lattices, Bose-Einstein condensates, hydrodynamics, plasmas, and optics. In optics, breathers can exist in either the anomalous or the normal dispersion regimes, but they have only been characterized in the former, to our knowledge. Here, externally pumped optical microresonators are used to characterize the breathing dynamics of localized waves in the normal dispersion regime. High- Q optical microresonators featuring normal dispersion can yield mode-locked Kerr combs whose time-domain waveform corresponds to circulating dark pulses in the cavity. We show that with relatively high pump power these Kerr combs can enter a breathing regime, in which the time-domain waveform remains a dark pulse but experiences a periodic modulation on a time scale much slower than the microresonator round trip time. The breathing is observed in the optical frequency domain as a significant difference in the phase and amplitude of the modulation experienced by different spectral lines. In the highly pumped regime, a transition to a chaotic breathing state where the waveform remains dark-pulse-like is also observed, for the first time to our knowledge; such a transition is reversible by reducing the pump power.
Additional Information
© 2018 American Physical Society. Received 8 June 2018; published 21 December 2018. This Letter was supported in part by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (Grant No. FA9550-15-1-0211), by the DARPA PULSE program (Grant No. W31P4Q-13-1-0018) from AMRDEC, and by the National Science Foundation (Grant No. ECCS-1509578). A. F. and V. T. C. acknowledge partial support by the Swedish Research Council and the European Research Council (DarkComb Grant Agreement No. 771410). C. B. acknowledge partial support from a postdoctoral fellowship from the Resnick Institute, Caltech. We gratefully acknowledge fruitful discussions with Xiaoxiao Xue, Nail Akhmediev, Zhen Qi, and Curtis Menyuk.Attached Files
Published - PhysRevLett.121.257401.pdf
Submitted - 1709.03912.pdf
Supplemental Material - Animation1.mp4
Supplemental Material - Animation2.mp4
Supplemental Material - darkbreather_SI_R2Submission.pdf
Files
Name | Size | Download all |
---|---|---|
md5:715290916c191870a81e216d32fa8985
|
2.6 MB | Preview Download |
md5:e10f8193e2d353ac4d21ad946afb5fee
|
3.8 MB | Download |
md5:ca319bc19a9ab132c681ccf8cfdb5328
|
800.1 kB | Preview Download |
md5:231c873ee6b8889751afa21ab9fc9727
|
1.5 MB | Preview Download |
md5:fc1fe50b19ad76c5c46c7f6c7225cb3f
|
3.6 MB | Download |
Additional details
- Alternative title
- Dark breathers in a normal dispersion optical microresonator
- Eprint ID
- 92184
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20190109-155711201
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR)
- FA9550-15-1-0211
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
- W31P4Q-13-1-0018
- NSF
- ECCS-1509578
- Svenska Forskningsrådet Formas
- European Research Council (ERC)
- 771410
- Resnick Sustainability Institute
- Created
-
2019-01-10Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2021-11-16Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Resnick Sustainability Institute