Abstract
Optical tweezers use laser light to trap and move microscopic particles in space. Here we demonstrate a similar control over ultrashort light pulses, but in time. Our experiment involves temporal cavity solitons that are stored in a passive loop of optical fibre pumped by a continuous wave 'holding' laser beam. The cavity solitons are trapped into specific time slots through a phase modulation of the holding beam, and moved around in time by manipulating the phase profile. We report both continuous and discrete manipulations of the temporal positions of picosecond light pulses, with the ability to simultaneously and independently control several pulses within a train. We also study the transient drifting dynamics and show complete agreement with theoretical predictions. Our study demonstrates how the unique particle-like characteristics of cavity solitons can be leveraged to achieve unprecedented control over light. These results could have significant ramifications for optical information processing.
Highlights
Optical tweezers use laser light to trap and move microscopic particles in space
The cavity solitons (CSs) exist as picosecond pulses of light, recirculating in a loop of optical fibre, and we expose them to temporal control gradients in the form of a gigahertz phase modulation imposed on the cavity holding beam
We consider a passive resonator constructed of single-mode optical fibre, driven with monochromatic laser light
Summary
Optical tweezers use laser light to trap and move microscopic particles in space. Here we demonstrate a similar control over ultrashort light pulses, but in time. The cavity solitons are trapped into specific time slots through a phase modulation of the holding beam, and moved around in time by manipulating the phase profile We report both continuous and discrete manipulations of the temporal positions of picosecond light pulses, with the ability to simultaneously and independently control several pulses within a train. The CSs exist as picosecond pulses of light, recirculating in a loop of optical fibre, and we expose them to temporal control gradients in the form of a gigahertz phase modulation imposed on the cavity holding beam. Our results demonstrate that individual ultrashort light pulses can be shifted temporally, forward or backward, using cw laser light This compares with conventional optical tweezers that trap and move microscopic particles in space[35,36,37], only here we manipulate light itself, and in time. We refer to our technique as the temporal tweezing of light
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