1. Unifying frequency combs in active and passive cavities: Temporal solitons in externally-driven ring lasers
- Author
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Columbo, L., Piccardo, M., Prati, F., Lugiato, L. A., Brambilla, M., Gatti, A., Silvestri, C., Gioannini, M., Opacak, N., Schwarz, B., and Capasso, F.
- Subjects
Physics - Optics - Abstract
Frequency combs have become a prominent research area in optics. Of particular interest as integrated comb technology are chip-scale sources, such as semiconductor lasers and microresonators, which consist of resonators embedding a nonlinear medium either with or without population inversion. Such active and passive cavities were so far treated distinctly. Here we propose a formal unification by introducing a general equation that describes both types of cavities. The equation also captures the physics of a hybrid device - a semiconductor ring laser with an external optical drive - in which we show the existence of temporal solitons, previously identified only in microresonators, thanks to symmetry breaking and self-localization phenomena typical of spatially-extended dissipative systems.
- Published
- 2020
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