Existence and stability of soliton-based frequency combs in the Lugiato-Lefever equation

Abstract

Kerr frequency combs are optical signals consisting of a multitude of equally spaced excited modes in frequency space. They are generated by converting a continuous-wave pump laser within an optical microresonator. It has been observed that the interplay of Kerr nonlinearity and dispersion in the microresonator can lead to a stable optical signal consisting of a periodic sequence of highly localized ultra-short pulses, resulting in broad frequency spectrum. The discovery that stable broadband frequency combs can be generated in microresonators has unlocked a wide range of promising applications, particularly in optical communications, spectroscopy and frequency metrology. In its simplest form, the physics in the microresonator is modeled by the Lugiato-Lefever equation, a damped nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation with forcing. In this paper we demonstrate that the Lugiato-Lefever equation indeed supports arbitrarily broad Kerr frequency combs by proving the existence and stability of periodic solutions consisting of any number of well-separated, strongly localized and highly nonlinear pulses on a single periodicity interval. We realize these periodic multiple pulse solutions as concatenations of individual bright cavity solitons by phrasing the problem as a reversible dynamical system and employing results from homoclinic bifurcation theory. The spatial dynamics formulation enables us to harness general results, based on Evans-function techniques and Lin's method, to rigorously establish diffusive spectral stability. This, in turn, yields nonlinear stability of the periodic multipulse solutions against localized and subharmonic perturbations.