Abstract
Micro-combs - optical frequency combs generated by integrated micro-cavity resonators – offer the full potential of their bulk counterparts, but in an integrated footprint. They have enabled breakthroughs in many fields including spectroscopy, microwave photonics, frequency synthesis, optical ranging, quantum sources, metrology and ultrahigh capacity data transmission. Here, by using a powerful class of micro-comb called soliton crystals, we achieve ultra-high data transmission over 75 km of standard optical fibre using a single integrated chip source. We demonstrate a line rate of 44.2 Terabits s−1 using the telecommunications C-band at 1550 nm with a spectral efficiency of 10.4 bits s−1 Hz−1. Soliton crystals exhibit robust and stable generation and operation as well as a high intrinsic efficiency that, together with an extremely low soliton micro-comb spacing of 48.9 GHz enable the use of a very high coherent data modulation format (64 QAM - quadrature amplitude modulated). This work demonstrates the capability of optical micro-combs to perform in demanding and practical optical communications networks.
Highlights
Micro-combs - optical frequency combs generated by integrated micro-cavity resonators – offer the full potential of their bulk counterparts, but in an integrated footprint
Recently[17,11], a powerful class of micro-comb termed soliton crystals was reported, and devices realised in a CMOS compatible platform[2,3,8,9,31] have proven highly successful at forming the basis for microwave and RF photonic devices[32,33]
A schematic illustrating the soliton crystal optical structure is shown in Fig. 1a, with the physical chip shown in Fig. 1b and the experimental setup for ultrahigh bandwidth optical transmission in Fig. 1c
Summary
Micro-combs - optical frequency combs generated by integrated micro-cavity resonators – offer the full potential of their bulk counterparts, but in an integrated footprint They have enabled breakthroughs in many fields including spectroscopy, microwave photonics, frequency synthesis, optical ranging, quantum sources, metrology and ultrahigh capacity data transmission. The discovery of temporal soliton states (DKS—dissipative Kerr solitons) 10,13–17 as a means of mode-locking micro-combs has enabled breakthroughs in many fields including spectroscopy[18,19], microwave photonics[20], frequency synthesis[21], optical ranging[22,23], quantum sources[24,25], metrology[26,27] and more One of their most-promising applications has been optical fibre communications, where they have enabled massively parallel ultrahigh capacity multiplexed data transmission[28,29,30]. Soliton crystals were so-named because of their crystal-like profile in the angular domain of tightly packed self-localised pulses within micro-ring resonators (MRRs)[17]
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