Chip-scale ultrafast soliton laser
Abstract
Femtosecond laser, owing to their ultrafast time scales and broad frequency bandwidths, have substantially changed fundamental science over the past decades, from chemistry and bio-imaging to quantum physics. Critically, many emerging industrial-scale photonic technologies -- such as optical interconnects, AI accelerators, quantum computing, and LiDAR -- also stand to benefit from their massive frequency parallelism. However, achieving a femtosecond-scale laser on-chip, constrained by size and system power input, has remained a long-standing challenge. Here, we demonstrate the first on-chip femtosecond laser, enabled by a new mechanism -- photorefraction-assisted soliton (PAS) mode-locking. Operating from a simple, low-voltage electrical supply, the laser provides deterministic, turn-key generation of sub-90-fs solitons. Furthermore, it provides electronic reconfigurability of its pulse properties and features an exceptional optical coherence with a 53 Hz intrinsic comb linewidth. This demonstration removes a key barrier to the full integration of chip-scale photonic systems for next-generation sensing, communication, metrology, and computing.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2510.15146,
title = {Chip-scale ultrafast soliton laser},
author = {Qili Hu and Raymond Lopez-Rios and Zhengdong Gao and Jingwei Ling and Shixin Xue and Jeremy Staffa and Yang He and Qiang Lin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.15146},
year = {2025}
}