Spontaneous symmetry breaking of Kerr cavity solitons

Abstract

We report numerical and experimental observations of spontaneous symmetry breaking of Kerr cavity solitons. We show that cavity solitons with mirror polarization states can co-exist and be individually addressed in a symmetric fiber ring resonator.

Dissipative Polarization Domain Walls in a Passive Coherently Driven Kerr Resonator

“…Controllable switching between the two beams finds natural applications in the encoding of optical signals, chaotic cryptography, and waveform synthesizers. In addition to passive systems, our results may be of consequence for the gain dynamics of ring lasers [17,18], and for systems that host Kerr solitons [19][20][21][22][23]-especially those with counterpropagating modes [24]. We numerically model this self-switching behavior using a coupled dynamical system that features only the self-and cross-phase Kerr nonlinearities and provide an explanation for its occurrence.…”