Abstract
Dissipative solitons are self-localized structures that can persist indefinitely in open systems driven out of equilibrium. They play a key role in photonics, underpinning technologies from mode-locked lasers to microresonator optical frequency combs. Here we report on experimental observations of spontaneous symmetry breaking of dissipative optical solitons. Our experiments are performed in a nonlinear optical ring resonator, where dissipative solitons arise in the form of persisting pulses of light known as Kerr cavity solitons. We engineer symmetry between two orthogonal polarization modes of the resonator and show that the solitons of the system can spontaneously break this symmetry, giving rise to two distinct but co-existing vectorial solitons with mirror-like, asymmetric polarization states. We also show that judiciously applied perturbations allow for deterministic switching between the two symmetry-broken dissipative soliton states. Our work delivers fundamental insights at the intersection of multi-mode nonlinear optical resonators, dissipative structures, and spontaneous symmetry breaking, and expands upon our understanding of dissipative solitons in coherently driven Kerr resonators.
Highlights
Dissipative solitons are self-localized structures that can persist indefinitely in open systems driven out of equilibrium
We note that the possibility of both temporal and polarization symmetry breaking in resonators that are synchronously driven with short pulses has been numerically identified[48], yet no experimental demonstrations or direct links to cavity solitons (CSs) physics have been presented
The coupling coefficient B describes the strength of the Kerr cross-phase interaction, Δ1,2 describe the detunings of the driving fields from the respective cavity resonances, and F1,2 describe the amplitude components of the driving field along the two eigenmodes
Summary
Dissipative solitons are self-localized structures that can persist indefinitely in open systems driven out of equilibrium. We engineer symmetry between two orthogonal polarization modes of the resonator and show that the solitons of the system can spontaneously break this symmetry, giving rise to two distinct but co-existing vectorial solitons with mirror-like, asymmetric polarization states. Our work delivers fundamental insights at the intersection of multi-mode nonlinear optical resonators, dissipative structures, and spontaneous symmetry breaking, and expands upon our understanding of dissipative solitons in coherently driven Kerr resonators. Whilst vectorial solitons that rely on a symbiotic combination between two orthogonal components have been extensively studied in single-pass waveguide propagation[33,34,35] and fiber lasers[36,37,38], there has so far been only a handful of theoretical studies on such structures in the context of temporal CSs in passive resonators[28,32], analyzed in the presence of asymmetric parameters with no experimental observations achieved. Our work provides fundamental insights at the intersection of two widely investigated nonlinear phenomena, linking together the rich physics of (vectorial) dissipative solitons[54,55,56,57] and SSB
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