Unifying frequency combs in active and passive cavities: Temporal solitons in externally-driven ring lasers
Abstract
Frequency combs have become a prominent research area in optics. Of particular interest as integrated comb technology are chip-scale sources, such as semiconductor lasers and microresonators, which consist of resonators embedding a nonlinear medium either with or without population inversion. Such active and passive cavities were so far treated distinctly. Here we propose a formal unification by introducing a general equation that describes both types of cavities. The equation also captures the physics of a hybrid device - a semiconductor ring laser with an external optical drive - in which we show the existence of temporal solitons, previously identified only in microresonators, thanks to symmetry breaking and self-localization phenomena typical of spatially-extended dissipative systems.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2007.07533,
title = {Unifying frequency combs in active and passive cavities: Temporal solitons in externally-driven ring lasers},
author = {L. Columbo and M. Piccardo and F. Prati and L. A. Lugiato and M. Brambilla and A. Gatti and C. Silvestri and M. Gioannini and N. Opacak and B. Schwarz and F. Capasso},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.07533},
year = {2021}
}