Related papers: Phase-sensitive symmetry breaking in bidirectional…
An optical ring resonator with third-order, or Kerr, nonlinearity will exhibit symmetry breaking between the two counterpropagating circulating powers when pumped with sufficient power in both the clockwise and counterclockwise directions.…
Spontaneous symmetry breaking is an important concept in many areas of physics. A fundamentally simple symmetry breaking mechanism in electrodynamics occurs between counter-propagating electromagnetic waves in ring resonators, mediated by…
Nonlinear effects in microresonators are efficient building blocks for all-optical computing and telecom systems. With the latest advances in microfabrication, coupled microresonators are used in a rapidly growing number of applications. In…
We experimentally observe a spontaneous temporal symmetry breaking instability in a coherently-driven passive optical Kerr resonator. The cavity is synchronously pumped by time-symmetric pulses yet we report output pulses with strongly…
Light is generally expected to travel through isotropic media independent of its direction. This makes it challenging to develop non-reciprocal optical elements like optical diodes or circulators, which currently rely on magneto-optical…
Spontaneous symmetry breaking leads to diverse phenomena across the natural sciences, from the Higgs mechanism in particle physics to superconductors and collective animal behavior. In photonic systems, the symmetry of light states can be…
We study the spontaneous temporal symmetry breaking instability in a coherently-driven passive optical Kerr resonator observed experimentally by Xu and Coen in Opt.~Lett.~{\bf 39}, 3492 (2014). We perform a detailed stability analysis of…
Symmetry breaking of light states is of interest for the understanding of nonlinear optics, photonic circuits, telecom applications and optical pulse generation. Here we demonstrate 4-fold symmetry breaking of the resonances of ring…
Spontaneous symmetry breaking in nonlinear systems provides a unified method to understand vastly different phenomena, ranging from Higgs mechanism [1] and superconductivity [2] to ecological stability [3] and genome generation [4].…
We derive a general theory of linear coupling and Kerr nonlinear coupling between modes of dielectric optical resonators from first principles. The treatment is not specific to a particular geometry or choice of mode basis, and can…
The Kerr effect in optical microresonators plays an important role for integrated photonic devices and enables third harmonic generation, four-wave mixing, and the generation of microresonator-based frequency combs. Here we experimentally…
We report the experimental observation of oscillatory antiphase switching between counter-propagating light beams in Kerr ring microresonators, including the emergence of periodic behaviour from a chaotic regime. Self-switching occurs in…
We report an experimental and theoretical investigation of a system whose dynamics is dominated by an intricate interplay between three key concepts of modern physics: topology, nonlinearity, and spontaneous symmetry breaking. The…
Measuring the phase of light is fundamental to optical imaging, sensing, and signal processing applications. Conventional optical phase measurements rely on multipath configurations, bulky interferometric setups, and computationally…
Dissipative solitons are self-localised structures that can persist indefinitely in "open" systems characterised by continual exchange of energy and/or matter with the environment. They play a key role in photonics, underpinning…
The rapidly growing field of integrated photonics is enabling a large number of novel devices for optical data processing, neuromorphic computing and circuits for quantum photonics. While many photonic devices are based on linear optics,…
Nonlinear kinetic inductance in a high Q superconducting coplanar waveguide microresonator can cause a bifurcation of the resonance curve. Near the critical pumping power and frequency for bifurcation, large parametric gain is observed for…
We study a critically coupled system (Opt. Lett., \textbf{32}, 1483 (2007)) with a Kerr-nonlinear spacer layer. Nonlinearity is shown to inhibit null-scattering in a critically coupled system at low powers. However, a system detuned from…
Kerr-effect-induced changes of the polarization state of light are well known in pulsed laser systems. An example is nonlinear polarization rotation, which is critical to the operation of many types of mode-locked lasers. Here, we…
Production of entangled photon pairs is important in secure communication systems, quantum computing, and fundamental physics experiments. Achieving efficient generation of such photon pairs with low-loss parametric oscillators is a key…