Self-switching Kerr oscillations of counter-propagating light in microresonators

Abstract

We report the experimental observation of oscillatory antiphase switching between counterpropagating light beams in Kerr ring microresonators, including the emergence of periodic behaviour from a chaotic regime. Self-switching occurs in balanced regimes of operation and is well captured by a simple coupled dynamical system featuring only the self-and cross-phase Kerr nonlinearities. Switching phenomena are due to temporal instabilities of symmetry-broken states combined with attractor merging that restores the broken symmetry on average. Self-switching of counterpropagating light is robust for realising controllable, all-optical generation of waveforms, signal encoding and chaotic cryptography.

Spontaneous symmetry breaking of dissipative optical solitons in a two-component Kerr resonator

“…We theoretically and experimentally show that, even when the two modes are equally driven, SSB gives rise to two distinct but co-existing CS states with mirror-like, asymmetric polarization states. The soliton symmetry breaking occurs via the same incoherent, Kerr cross-coupling mechanism that was theoretically proposed several decades ago to give rise to SSB of counterpropagating [34,35] or cross-polarized [36] homogeneous continuous wave (cw) intracavity fields, and that has recently been observed in experiments [33,[37][38][39]. Our results demonstrate for the first time that such SSB dynamics can also occur for ultrashort, temporally localised CS states.…”