Experimental Observations of Cavity Solitons in a Magnesium Fluoride Microdisk

Abstract

The generation of cavity solitons in microresonators was first demonstrated in 2013. The groundbreaking work enabled the generation of stable low noise frequency combs in a microscopic, and eventually on-chip, platform. However, the ability to access the soliton regime remains significantly complicated by the thermal nonlinearity of microresonators. In this Thesis, a passive power stabilisation scheme involving the employment of an auxiliary laser is applied to a MgF2 microdisk. Using an auxiliary laser, we are able to generate cavity solitons consistently and reliably. We also investigated the effect of the relative detuning between the auxiliary and pump lasers. We find that by operating in distinct modes their detuning can be made arbitrarily small. We detune the pump and auxiliary lasers by seven and one FSRs, and report that cavity soliton states can be reliably excited in each case. In our final work we generate counter-propagating solitons in the microdisk. By pumping the microresonator in both directions we successfully generated three unique counter-propagating cavity soliton states.