Suppression of temporal cavity soliton interactions by phase modulation of the driving beam

Abstract

Summary form only given. Temporal cavity solitons (CS) are optical pulses that circulate indefinitely around a coherently-driven nonlinear passive optical cavity [1]. They are genuine solitons in the sense that chromatic dispersion is balanced by nonlinearity. In addition, a continuous-wave (cw) driving beam compensates for the intracavity losses. This double-balancing justifies classifying these objects as dissipative solitons. As a consequence, they are robust attractors and their shape and duration are determined solely by the parameters of the supporting cavity. They can be excited incoherently by any suitable addressing pulses through cross-phase modulation. Thus, temporal CSs have been proposed as ideal candidates for bits in an optical memory system [1]. So far, temporal CSs have only been observed in an optical fiber cavity. It is well known however that solitons in optical fibers excite acoustic waves travelling across the fiber cross-section [2]. Such acoustic waves lead to material density variation and hence, modulate the refractive index. In this way, a soliton can attract or repel other solitons trailing behind it, depending on the soliton separation [2]. Such interactions may prove detrimental to the potential application mentioned earlier. It has been suggested that, in theory, this effect may be suppressed with a phase modulation technique [3]. In this summary, we present experimental results which verify that sinusoidal phase modulation of the driving beam can suppress acoustic-induced long-range interactions of temporal CSs in a fiber cavity. In fact, this technique is also capable of overcoming the effects of environmental perturbations.