Columbo L, Piccardo M, Prati F, Lugiato L A, Brambilla M, Gatti A, Silvestri C, Gioannini M, Opačak N, Schwarz B, Capasso F
Dipartimento di Elettronica e Telecomunicazioni, Politecnico di Torino, 10129 Torino, Italy.
CNR-Istituto di Fotonica e Nanotecnologie, 70126 Bari, Italy.
Phys Rev Lett. 2021 Apr 30;126(17):173903. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.173903.
Frequency combs have become a prominent research area in optics. Of particular interest as integrated comb technology are chip-scale sources, such as semiconductor lasers and microresonators, which consist of resonators embedding a nonlinear medium either with or without population inversion. Such active and passive cavities were so far treated distinctly. Here we propose a formal unification by introducing a general equation that describes both types of cavities. The equation also captures the physics of a hybrid device-a semiconductor ring laser with an external optical drive-in which we show the existence of temporal solitons, previously identified only in microresonators, thanks to symmetry breaking and self-localization phenomena typical of spatially extended dissipative systems.
频率梳已成为光学领域一个重要的研究方向。作为集成梳状技术，特别令人感兴趣的是芯片级光源，例如半导体激光器和微谐振器，它们由嵌入非线性介质的谐振器组成，介质可以有或没有粒子数反转。到目前为止，这种有源和无源腔是分别处理的。在此，我们通过引入一个描述这两种类型腔的通用方程提出一种形式上的统一。该方程还涵盖了一种混合器件——具有外部光驱动的半导体环形激光器——的物理特性，在这种器件中，由于空间扩展耗散系统典型的对称性破缺和自局域化现象，我们展示了时间孤子的存在，此前时间孤子仅在微谐振器中被发现。
