Turnkey deterministic soliton crystal generation

Abstract

The deterministic generation of robust soliton comb has significant meaning for the optical frequency combs to be widely used in various applications. As a novel form of microcomb, Soliton crystal holds the advantages of easy generation, high conversion efficiency, and excellent thermal robustness. Here, we report the turnkey deterministic generation of "Palm-like" soliton crystal with a free-running scheme. The robustness of the turnkey soliton crystal generation is also investigated in multiple aspects, including the success rate, the thermal robustness, and the long-term stability. The experiment results reveal our turnkey soliton crystal can achieve nearly a 100% success rate with a power variation less than 1.5 dB over one hundred trials of two samples, is insensitive to thermal effect, and is robust to the environment during four-hour laboratory time.