Pockels soliton microcomb

Alexander W. Bruch, Xianwen Liu, Zheng Gong, Joshua B. Surya, Ming Li, Chang Ling Zou, Hong X. Tang*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

117 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Kerr soliton microcombs have recently emerged as a prominent topic in integrated photonics and have enabled new horizons for optical frequency metrology. Kerr soliton microcombs, as the name suggests, are based on high-order cubic optical nonlinearity. It is desirable to exploit quadratic photonic materials, namely Pockels materials, for soliton generation and on-chip implementation of 1f–2f comb self-referencing. Such quadratically driven solitons have been proposed theoretically, but have not yet been observed in a nanophotonic platform, despite recent progress in quadratic comb generation in free-space and crystalline resonators. Here, we report photonic-chip-based Pockels microcomb solitons driven by three-wave mixing in an aluminium nitride microring resonator. In contrast to typical Kerr solitons, the Pockels soliton features unity soliton generation fidelity, two-by-two evolution of multi-soliton states, favourable tuning dynamics and high pump-to-soliton conversion efficiency.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)21-27
Number of pages7
JournalNature Photonics
Volume15
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jan 2021
Externally publishedYes

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