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This article reports an implementation of a microsphere-based optical frequency comb (OFC) generator for substitution of individual laser arrays and simulates wavelength division multiplexed passive optical network (WDM-PON) based on this OFC generator. Our proposed generator is built based on silica microsphere, barely studied for fiber optical communication systems, and is a promising solution with photonic integration capability. Kerr OFC as a multiple light source containing more than 20 spectral carriers in the fundamental mode family in the C-band and beyond is demonstrated experimentally. Four of these OFC generator carriers with the highest peak power are studied in simulated 4-channel 393 GHz spaced WDM-PON. Additionally, we show this OFC as a source of optical carriers capable of providing data transmission over most utilized fiber types in modern optical communication systems, namely, singlemode fiber (SMF), non-zero dispersion-shifted fiber (NZ-DSF), and cut-off shifted fiber (CSF). We show through the simulations that error-free data transmission is possible, providing a total transmission capacity of 40 Gbit/s by using four OFC generated carriers.INDEX TERMS Optical frequency comb (OFC), silica microsphere, wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM), passive optical network (PON).

Brillouin microlasers based on microresonators with whispering gallery modes (WGMs) are in high demand for different applications including sensing and biosensing. We fabricated a microsphere resonator with WGMs from a synthesized high-quality tellurite glass with record high Q-factors for tellurite microresonators (Q ≥ 2.5 × 107), a high Brillouin gain coefficient (compared to standard materials, e.g., silica glasses), and a Brillouin frequency shift of 9 ± 0.5 GHz. The high density of excited resonance modes and high loaded Q-factors allowed us to achieve experimentally cascade Stokes-Brillouin lasing up to the 4th order inclusive. The experimental results are supported by the results of the theoretical analysis. We also theoretically obtained the dependences of the output Brillouin powers on the pump power and found the pump-power thresholds for the first five Brillouin orders at different values of pump frequency detuning and Q-factors, and showed a significant effect of these parameters on the processes under consideration.