Bunching of temporal cavity solitons via forward Brillouin scattering

Miro Erkintalo,Kathy Luo,Stéphane Coen,Jae K Jang,Stuart G Murdoch

doi:10.1088/1367-2630/17/11/115009

Abstract

We report on the experimental observation of bunching dynamics with temporal cavity solitons (CSs) in a continuously-driven passive fibre resonator. Specifically, we excite a large number of ultrashort CSs with random temporal separations, and observe in real time how the initially random sequence self-organizes into regularly-spaced aggregates. To explain our experimental observations, we develop a simple theoretical model that allows long-range acoustically-induced interactions between a large number of temporal CSs to be simulated. Significantly, results from our simulations are in excellent agreement with our experimental observations, strongly suggesting that the soliton bunching dynamics arise from forward Brillouin scattering. In addition to confirming prior theoretical analyses and unveiling a new CS self-organization phenomenon, our findings elucidate the manner in which sound interacts with large ensembles of ultrashort pulses of light.

Highlights

Temporal cavity solitons (CSs) are pulses of light that can persist in externally, coherently-driven passive nonlinear optical resonators [1, 2]
The cavity is coherently driven with an ultra-narrow linewidth (< 1 kHz) continuous-wave laser centred at 1550 nm wavelength, that is externally amplified to about 1 W with an erbium-doped fibre amplifier (EDFA)
We have examined configurations involving a small number of temporal CSs [12, 21]

Summary

Introduction

Temporal cavity solitons (CSs) are pulses of light that can persist in externally, coherently-driven passive nonlinear optical resonators [1, 2]. CSs have the ability to continuously extract energy from the coherent field driving the resonator so as to balance the power losses they suffer at each cavity roundtrip. Because of the presence of the coherent driving beam, CSs are superimposed and phase-locked on a homogeneous background field filling the entire resonator [8].

Methods

Results

Conclusion