Dispersive-wave induced noise limits in miniature soliton microwave sources
Abstract
Compact, low-noise microwave sources are required throughout a wide range of application areas including frequency metrology, wireless-communications and airborne radar systems. And the photonic generation of microwaves using soliton microcombs offers a path towards integrated, low noise microwave signal sources. In these devices, a so called quiet-point of operation has been shown to reduce microwave frequency noise. Such operation decouples pump frequency noise from the soliton's motion by balancing the Raman self-frequency shift with dispersive-wave recoil. Here, we explore the limit of this noise suppression approach and reveal a fundamental noise mechanism associated with fluctuations of the dispersive wave frequency. At the same time, pump noise reduction by as much as 36 dB is demonstrated. This fundamental noise mechanism is expected to impact microwave noise (and pulse timing jitter) whenever solitons radiate into dispersive waves belonging to different spatial mode families.
Additional Information
© The Author(s) 2021. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Received 27 September 2020; Accepted 03 February 2021; Published 04 March 2021. We thank S. Papp at NIST for helpful comments during the preparation of this manuscript, N. M. Kondratiev for discussion on simulation of thermorefractive noise, as well as X. Zhang for help on simulation of the dispersive wave. The authors gratefully acknowledge the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under the APhI program (Award FA9453-19-C-0029) and the Kavli Nanoscience Institute. Q.-X.J. thanks the Caltech SURF program. Data availability: The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available on figshare (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.13513995). All other data used in this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. Code availability: The codes that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request. These authors contributed equally: Qi-Fan Yang, Qing-Xin Ji, Lue Wu. Author Contributions: Experiments were conceived and designed by Q-F.Y., Q-X.J. and K.V. Measurements are performed by Q-F.Y. and Q-X.J. with assistance from L.W., B.S., C.B. and Z.Y. Devices are fabricated and packaged by L.W. Modelling is performed by Q-F.Y., Q-X.J., H.W. and B.S. All authors participated in preparing the manuscript. The authors declare no competing interests. Peer review information: Nature Communications thanks the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available.Attached Files
Published - s41467-021-21658-7.pdf
Supplemental Material - 41467_2021_21658_MOESM1_ESM.pdf
Supplemental Material - 41467_2021_21658_MOESM2_ESM.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 108316
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20210304-153236998
- FA9453-19-C-0029
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
- Kavli Nanoscience Institute
- Caltech Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF)
- Created
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2021-03-04Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2023-06-01Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Kavli Nanoscience Institute