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arXiv:1803.10203 · Physical Review A

Spontaneous symmetry breaking and trapping of temporal Kerr cavity solitons by pulsed or amplitude-modulated driving fields

Ian Hendry, Wei Chen, Yadong Wang, Bruno Garbin, J. Javaloyes, Gian‐Luca Oppo, Stéphane Coen, Stuart G. Murdoch, Miro J. Erkintalo

Published May 25, 2018• 73 citations

Abstract

We report on a systematic study of temporal Kerr cavity soliton dynamics in the presence of pulsed or amplitude-modulated driving fields. In stark contrast to the more extensively studied case of phase modulations, we find that Kerr cavity solitons are not always attracted to maxima or minima of driving field amplitude inhomogeneities. Instead, we find that the solitons are attracted to temporal positions associated with specific driving field values that depend only on the cavity detuning. We describe our findings in light of a spontaneous symmetry breaking instability that physically ensues from a competition between coherent driving and nonlinear propagation effects. In addition to identifying a previously unfamiliar type of Kerr cavity soliton behavior, our results provide valuable insights into practical cavity configurations employing pulsed or amplitude-modulated driving fields.

DOI: 10.1103/physreva.97.053834

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Temporal solitons in coherently driven optical cavities have drawn considerable interest for their remarkable stability and promising applications such as in optical communications and spectroscopy [1]. These solitons arise in high-finesse cavities through a delicate balance between dispersion and Kerr nonlinearity, as well as gain and loss. In passive cavities, the coherent driving field provides the gain. Thus, in practice, only a small fraction of the soliton power can be extracted. Active cavity solitons (ACSs) [2], [3] overcome this limitation by integrating an intracavity amplifier to partially compensate for losses while keeping the cavity below lasing threshold. In this work, we leverage the active cavity scheme to theoretically and experimentally demonstrate the formation of stable ACSs with output coupling up to 90% under low power continuous-wave (CW) driving.

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We introduce a model of a two-dimensional (2D) self-attractive medium embedded into a quasi-1D symmetric double-well potential (DWP), whose depth is subject to periodic modulations (management). The model applies to matter waves in Bose–Einstein condensates (BECs), as well as to the nonlinear transmission of light (in spatial and temporal domains alike). It is known that, in the absence of the management, the DWP induces the spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) of 2D solitons, when their norm exceeds a critical value. Above the SSB point, symmetric solitons are unstable, while the system supports stable asymmetric ones. The DWP also admits Josephson oscillations of solitons between the two wells. We study effects of periodic modulations of the DWP's depth on the stability of symmetric, asymmetric, and oscillating solitons. Stability areas for the solitons of these three types are produced in the plane of the modulation frequency and amplitude. The shape of the stability borders is strongly affected by the proximity of the modulation frequency to the frequency of free oscillations of the soliton in the static DWP structure, the solitons being destroyed by the modulations with an arbitrarily small amplitude at the point of the exact resonance. Similar results are obtained for an extended 2D model, which combines the transverse DWP and a longitudinal periodic potential (optical lattice, in terms of BEC). The findings are compared with those reported in other recently studied management models for 1D and 2D solitons, which makes it possible to draw general conclusions about the stability limits of solitons under the resonant management.