Rapid Repetition Rate Fluctuation Measurement of Soliton Crystals in a Microresonator.

Abstract

Temporal solitons have attracted great interest in the past decades for their behavior in a steady state, where the dispersion is balanced by the nonlinearity in a propagation Kerr medium. The development of dissipative Kerr solitons (DKSs) in high-Q microcavities drives a novel, compact, chip-scale soliton source. When DKSs serve as femtosecond pulses, the repetition rate fluctuation can be applied to ultrahigh precision metrology, high-speed optical sampling, and optical clocks, etc. In this paper, the rapid repetition rate fluctuation of soliton crystals (SCs), a special state of DKSs where particle-like solitons are tightly packed and fully occupy a resonator, is measured based on the well-known delayed self-heterodyne method. The SCs are generated using a thermal-controlled method. The pump is a frequency fixed laser with a linewidth of 100 Hz. The integral time in frequency fluctuation measurements is controlled by the length of the delay fiber. For a SC with a single vacancy, the repetition rate fluctuations are ~53.24 Hz within 10 µs and ~509.32 Hz within 125 µs, respectively.