Microwave signal generation with fast frequency tuning underlies many applications including sensing, imaging, ranging, time keeping, wireless communication, and high-speed electronics. Soliton microcombs are a promising new approach for photonic-based microwave signal synthesis. To date, however, tuning rate has been limited in microcombs (and in frequency combs generally). Here, we demonstrate the first microwave-rate soliton microcomb whose repetition rate can be tuned at a high speed. By integrating an electro-optic tuning/modulation element into a lithium niobate comb microresonator, a modulation bandwidth up to 75 MHz and a continuous frequency modulation rate up to 5.0 * 10^14 Hz/s are achieved, several orders-of-magnitude faster than existing microcomb technology. These features are especially useful for disciplining an optical VCO to a long-term reference such as an optical clock or for tight phase lock in dual-microcomb clocks or synthesizers. Moreover, the microwave signal rate can be set to any X - W band rate. Besides its positive impact on microwave photonics, fast repetition rate control is generally important in all applications of frequency combs.
Photonic chip-based soliton microcombs have shown rapid progress and have already been used in many system-level applications, including coherent communications, astrophysical spectrometer calibration and ultrafast ranging. While there has been substantial progress in realizing soliton microcombs that rely on compact laser diodes, culminating in devices that only utilize a semiconductor amplifier or a self-injection-locked laser as a pump source, accessing and generating single soliton states with electronically detectable line rates from a compact laser module has remained challenging. Here w…
The rapidly maturing integrated Kerr microcombs show significant potential for microwave photonics. Yet, state-of-the-art microcomb based radiofrequency (RF) filters have required programmable pulse shapers, which inevitably increase the system cost, footprint, and complexity. Here, by leveraging the smooth spectral envelope of single solitons, we demonstrate for the first time microcomb based RF filters free from any additional pulse shaping. More importantly, we achieve all-optical reconfiguration of the RF filters by exploiting the intrinsically rich soliton configurations. Specifically, we…
While soliton microcombs offer the potential for integration of powerful frequency metrology and precision spectroscopy systems, their operation requires complex startup and feedback protocols that necessitate difficult-to-integrate optical and electrical components. Moreover, CMOS-rate microcombs, required in nearly all comb systems, have resisted integration because of their power requirements. Here, a regime for turnkey operation of soliton microcombs co-integrated with a pump laser is demonstrated and theoretically explained. Significantly, a new operating point is shown to appear from whi…
Optical frequency combs have revolutionized frequency metrology and timekeeping, and can be used in a wide range of optical technologies. Advances are under way that allow dramatic miniaturization of optical frequency combs using Kerr nonlinear optical microresonators, where broadband and coherent optical frequency combs can be generated from a continuous wave laser. Such `microcombs', provide a broad bandwidth with low power consumption, unprecedented form factor, wafer scale fabrication compatibility. For future high volume applications, integration and electrical pumping of soliton microcom…
Silicon photonics enables wafer-scale integration of optical functionalities on chip. A silicon-based laser frequency combs could significantly expand the applications of silicon photonics, by providing integrated sources of mutually coherent laser lines for terabit-per-second transceivers, parallel coherent LiDAR, or photonics-assisted signal processing. Here, we report on heterogeneously integrated laser soliton microcombs combining both InP/Si semiconductor lasers and ultralow-loss silicon nitride microresonators on monolithic silicon substrate. Thousands of devices are produced from a sing…
Microresonator-based optical frequency combs emitted from high-quality-factor microresonators, also known as microcombs, have opened up new horizons to areas of optical frequency comb technology including frequency metrology, precision sensing, and optical communication. To extend the capability of microcombs for such applications, large and reliable tunability is of critical importance. Here, we show broad spectral tuning of Kerr soliton microcombs in a thermally controlled crystalline microresonator with pump-detuning stabilization. The fundamental elements composing frequency combs, namely …
High-speed laser frequency actuation is critical in all applications employing lasers and frequency combs, and is prerequisite for phase locking, frequency stabilization and stability transfer among multiple optical carriers. Soliton microcombs have emerged as chip-scale, broadband and low-power-consumption frequency comb sources.Yet, integrated microcombs relying on thermal heaters for on-chip actuation all exhibit only kilohertz actuation bandwidth. Consequently, high-speed actuation and locking of microcombs have been attained only with off-chip bulk modulators. Here, we present high-speed …
The synthesis of ultralow-noise microwaves is of both scientific and technological relevance for timing, metrology, communications and radio-astronomy. Today, the lowest reported phase noise signals are obtained via optical frequency-division using mode-locked laser frequency combs. Nonetheless, this technique ideally requires high repetition rates and tight comb stabilisation. Here, a soliton microcomb with a 14 GHz repetition rate is generated with an ultra-stable pump laser and used to derive an ultralow-noise microwave reference signal, with an absolute phase noise level below -60 dBc/Hz a…
Dissipative Kerr soliton microcombs in microresonators has enabled fundamental advances in chip scale precision metrology, communication, spectroscopy, and parallel signal processing. Here we demonstrate polarization diverse soliton transitions and deterministic switching dynamics of a self stabilized microcomb in a strongly coupled dispersion-managed microresonator driven with a single pump laser. The switching dynamics are induced by the differential thermorefractivity between coupled transverse magnetic and transverse electric supermodes during the forward backward pump detunings. The achie…
Kerr soliton microcombs have recently emerged as a prominent topic in integrated photonics and enabled new horizons for optical frequency metrology. Kerr soliton microcombs, as its name suggests, are based on the high-order cubic optical nonlinearity. It is desirable to exploit quadratic photonic materials, namely Pockels materials, for soliton generation and on-chip implementation of 1f-2f comb self-referencing. Such quadratically-driven solitons have been theoretically proposed, but have not yet been observed in a nanophotonic platform despite of recent progresses in quadratic comb generatio…
Soliton microcombs provide a versatile platform for realizing fundamental studies and technological applications. To be utilized as frequency rulers for precision metrology, soliton microcombs must display broadband phase coherence, a parameter characterized by the optical phase or frequency noise of the comb lines and their corresponding optical linewidths. Here, we analyse the optical phase-noise dynamics in soliton microcombs generated in silicon nitride high-Q microresonators and show that, because of the Raman self-frequency shift or dispersive-wave recoil, the Lorentzian linewidth of som…
Microcombs are powerful tools as sources of multiple wavelength channels for photonic RF signal processing. They offer a compact device footprint, large numbers of wavelengths, and wide Nyquist bands. Here, we review recent progress on microcomb-based photonic RF signal processors, including true time delays, reconfigurable filters, Hilbert transformers, differentiators, and channelizers. The strong potential of optical micro-combs for RF photonics applications in terms of functions and integrability is also discussed.
We demonstrate an RF photonic fractional Hilbert transformer based on an integrated Kerr micro-comb source featuring a record low free spectral range of 48.9 GHz, yielding 75 microcomb lines across the C-band. By programming and shaping the comb lines according to calculated tap weights, we demonstrate that the Hilbert transformer can achieve tunable bandwidths ranging from 1.2 to 15.3 GHz, switchable centre frequencies from baseband to 9.5 GHz, and arbitrary fractional orders. We experimentally characterize the RF amplitude and phase response of the tunable bandpass and lowpass Hilbert transf…
In this Letter, we investigate the feasibility and performance of wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) optical communications using an integrated dissipative Kerr soliton micro-comb as the multi-channel laser source. First, we confirm that soliton microcomb pumped directly by a DFB laser self-injection locked to the host micro-cavity has sufficiently low frequency and amplitude noises to encode advanced data formats. Second, perfect soliton crystals are exploited to boost the power level of each microcomb line, so that they can be directly used for data modulation excluding pre-amplification.…
Soliton microcombs offer the prospect of advanced optical metrology and timing systems in compact form factors. In these applications, pumping of microcombs directly from a semiconductor laser without amplification or triggering components is desirable for reduced power operation and to simplify system design. At the same time, low repetition rate microcombs are required in many comb applications for interface to detectors and electronics, but their increased mode volume makes them challenging to pump at low power. Here, 10 GHz repetition rate soliton microcombs are directly pumped by low-powe…
The demand for high-speed and highly efficient optical communication techniques has been rapidly growing due to the ever-increasing volume of data traffic. As well as the digital coherent communication used for core and metro networks, intensity modulation and direct detection (IM-DD) are still promising schemes in intra/inter data centers thanks to their low latency, high reliability, and good cost performance. In this work, we study a microresonator-based frequency comb as a potential light source for future IM-DD optical systems where applications may include replacing individual stabilized…
The Terahertz or millimeter wave frequency band (300 GHz - 3 THz) is spectrally located between microwaves and infrared light and has attracted significant interest for applications in broadband wireless communications, space-borne radiometers for Earth remote sensing, astrophysics, and imaging. In particular optically generated THz waves are of high interest for low-noise signal generation. In particular optically generated THz waves are of high interest for low-noise signal generation. Here, we propose and demonstrate stabilized terahertz wave generation using a microresonator-based frequenc…
Microcombs are revolutionizing optoelectronics by providing parallelized, mutually coherent wavelength channels for time-frequency metrology and information processing. To implement this essential function in integrated photonic systems, it is desirable to drive microcombs directly with an on-chip laser in a simple and flexible way. However, two major difficulties are preventing this goal: 1) generating mode-locked comb states usually requires a significant amount of pump power and 2) the requirement to align laser and resonator frequency significantly complicates operation and limits the tuna…
Optical communication systems have come through five orders of magnitude improvement in data rate over the last three decades. The increased demand in data traffic and the limited optoelectronic component bandwidths have led to state-of-the-art systems employing hundreds of separate lasers in each transmitter. Given the limited optical amplifier bandwidths, focus is now shifting to maximize the spectral efficiency, SE. However, the frequency jitter from neighbouring lasers results in uncertainties of the exact channel wavelength, requiring large guardbands to avoid catastrophic channel overlap…
The emerging microresonator-based frequency combs revolutionize a broad range of applications from optical communications to astronomical calibration. Despite of their significant merits, low energy efficiency and the lack of all-optical dynamical control severely hinder the transfer of microcomb system to real-world applications. Here, by introducing active lasing medium into the soliton microcomb, for the first time, we experimentally achieve the chiral soliton with agile on-off switch and tunable dual-comb generation in a packaged microresonator. It is found that such a microresonator enabl…
Thermal noise usually dominates the low-frequency region of the optical phase noise of soliton microcombs, leading to decoherence and limiting many aspects of applications. In this work, we demonstrate a simple and reliable way to mitigate this noise by laser cooling with the pump laser. The key is rendering the pump laser to simultaneously excite two neighboring cavity modes from different families that are respectively red and blue detuned, one for soliton generation and the other one for laser cooling.
We explore intrinsic thermal noise in soliton microcombs, revealing thermodynamic correlations induced by nonlinearity and group-velocity dispersion. A suitable dispersion design gives rise to control over thermal-noise transduction from the environment to a soliton microcomb. We present simulations with the Lugiato-Lefever equation (LLE), including temperature as a stochastic variable. By systematically tuning the dispersion, we suppress repetition-rate frequency fluctuations by up to 50 decibels for different LLE soliton solutions. In an experiment, we observe a measurement-system-limited 15…
Soliton microcombs -- phase-locked microcavity frequency combs -- have become the foundation of several classical technologies in integrated photonics, including spectroscopy, LiDAR, and optical computing. Despite the predicted multimode entanglement across the comb, experimental study of the quantum optics of the soliton microcomb has been elusive. In this work, we use second-order photon correlations to study the underlying quantum processes of soliton microcombs in an integrated silicon carbide microresonator. We show that a stable temporal lattice of solitons can isolate a multimode below-…
For its many useful properties, including second and third-order optical nonlinearity as well as electro-optic control, lithium niobate is considered an important potential microcomb material. Here, a soliton microcomb is demonstrated in a monolithic high-Q lithium niobate resonator. Besides the demonstration of soliton mode locking, the photorefractive effect enables mode locking to self-start and soliton switching to occur bi-directionally. Second-harmonic generation of the soliton spectrum is also observed, an essential step for comb self-referencing. The Raman shock time constant of lithiu…
Optical frequency comb, with precisely controlled spectral lines spanning a broad range, has been the key enabling technology for many scientific breakthroughs. In addition to the traditional implementation based on modelocked lasers, photonic frequency microcombs based on dissipative Kerr and quadratic cavity solitons in high-Q microresonators have become invaluable in applications requiring compact footprint, low cost, good energy efficiency, large comb spacing, and access to nonconventional spectral regions. In this review, we comprehensively examine the recent progress of photonic frequenc…
Spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) is a widely used and minimally invaive technique for bio-medical imaging [1]. SD-OCT typically relies on the use of superluminescent diodes (SLD), which provide a low-noise and broadband optical spectrum. Recent advances in photonic chipscale frequency combs [2, 3] based on soliton formation in photonic integrated microresonators provide an chipscale alternative illumination scheme for SD-OCT. Yet to date, the use of such soliton microcombs in OCT has not yet been analyzed. Here we explore the use of soliton microcombs in spectral domain OC…
Advances in microresonator-based soliton generation promise chip-scale integration of optical frequency comb for applications spanning from time keeping to frequency synthesis. Miniaturized cavities harness Kerr nonlinearity and enable terahertz soliton repetition rates. However, such high repetition rates are not amenable to direct electronic detection. Here, we demonstrate hybrid Kerr and electro-optic microcombs using the lithium niobate thin film that exhibits both Kerr and Pockels nonlinearities. By interleaving the high-repetition-rate Kerr soliton comb with the low-repetition-rate elect…
Multiple applications of relevance in photonics, such as spectrally efficient coherent communications, microwave synthesis or the calibration of astronomical spectrographs, would benefit from soliton microcombs operating at repetition rates <50GHz. However, attaining soliton microcombs with low repetition rates using photonic integration technologies represents a formidable challenge. Expanding the cavity volume results in a drop of intracavity intensity that can only be offset by an encompassing rise in quality factor. In addition, reducing the footprint of the microresonator on a planar inte…
Frequency combs have applications that extend from the ultra-violet into the mid-infrared bands. Microcombs, a miniature and often semiconductor-chip-based device, can potentially access most of these applications, but are currently more limited in spectral reach. Here, we demonstrate mode-locked silica microcombs with emission near the edge of the visible spectrum. By using both geometrical and mode-hybridization dispersion control, devices are engineered for soliton generation while also maintaining optical $Q$ factors as high as 80 million. Electronics-bandwidth-compatible (20 GHz) soliton …
Coherent ranging, also known as frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) laser based ranging (LIDAR) is currently developed for long range 3D distance and velocimetry in autonomous driving. Its principle is based on mapping distance to frequency, and to simultaneously measure the Doppler shift of reflected light using frequency chirped signals, similar to Sonar or Radar. Yet, despite these advantages, coherent ranging exhibits lower acquisition speed and requires precisely chirped and highly-coherent laser sources, hindering their widespread use and impeding Parallelization, compared to mode…
Geometric dispersion in integrated microresonators plays a major role in nonlinear optics applications, especially at short wavelengths, to compensate the natural material normal dispersion. Tailoring of geometric confinement allows for anomalous dispersion, which in particular enables the formation of microcombs which can be tuned into the dissipative Kerr soliton (DKS) regime. Due to processes like soliton-induced dispersive wave generation, broadband DKS combs are particularly sensitive to higher-order dispersion, which in turn is sensitive to the ring dimensions at the nanometer-level. For…
The generation of dissipative Kerr solitons in optical microresonators has provided a route to compact frequency combs of high repetition rate, which have already been employed for optical frequency synthesizers, ultrafast ranging, coherent telecommunication and dual-comb spectroscopy. Silicon nitride (Si$_3$N$_4$) microresonators are promising for photonic integrated soliton microcombs. Yet to date, soliton formation in Si$_3$N$_4$ microresonators at electronically detectable repetition rates, typically less than 100 GHz, is hindered by the requirement of external power amplifiers, due to the…
Frequency microcombs, successors to mode-locked laser and fiber combs, enable miniature rulers of light for applications including precision metrology, molecular fingerprinting, and exoplanet discoveries. To enable the frequency ruling function, microcombs must be stabilized by locking their carrier-envelop offset frequency. So far, the microcomb stabilization remains compounded by the elaborate optics external to the chip, thus evading its scaling benefit. To address this challenge, here we demonstrate a nanophotonic chip solution based on aluminum nitride thin films, which simultaneously off…
Dissipative Kerr soliton microcomb has been recognized as a promising on-chip multi-wavelength laser source for fiber optical communications, as its comb lines possess frequency and phase stability far beyond independent lasers. In the scenarios of coherent optical transmission and interconnect, a highly beneficial but rarely explored target is to re-generate a Kerr soliton microcomb at the receiver side as local oscillators that conserve the frequency and phase property of the incoming data carriers, so that to enable coherent detection with minimized optical and electrical compensations. Her…
Laser-based range measurement systems (LIDAR) are important in many application areas including autonomous vehicles, robotics, manufacturing, formation-flying of satellites, and basic science. Coherent laser ranging systems using dual frequency combs provide an unprecedented combination of long range, high precision and fast update rate. Here, dual-comb distance measurement using chip-based soliton microcombs is demonstrated. Moreover, the dual frequency combs are generated within a single microresonator as counter-propating solitons using a single pump laser. Time-of-flight measurement with 2…
Power-Bandwidth Scaling of Resonantly Coupled Soliton Microcombs
State Key Laboratory for Artificial Microstructure and Mesoscopic Physics and Frontiers Science Center for Nano-optoelectronics, School of Physics, Peking University（北京大学物理学院人工微结构和介观物理国家重点实验室及纳米光电前沿科学中心）；Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院物理研究所北京凝聚态物理国家研究中心）；Peking University Yangtze Delta Institute of Optoelectronics（北京大学长三角光学光电研究院）；Collaborative Innovation Center of Extreme Optics, Shanxi University（山西大学极端光学协同创新中心）；Hefei National Laboratory（合肥国家实验室）
