Bright solitons in hybrid-dispersion photonic crystal microresonators

Abstract

Bright dissipative Kerr solitons in optical microresonators provide chip-scale sources of ultrashort pulses and frequency combs. Their properties are defined by the cavity dispersion for which fundamentally conflicting requirements exist: short pulses and broadband spectra require weak dispersion, whereas strong dispersion is associated with predictable dynamics. Here, we resolve this conflict by introducing a localized strong-dispersion section spanning several modes around the pump resonance within an otherwise weakly dispersive system. We implement this hybrid-dispersion scheme in a photonic crystal microresonator and reveal a new soliton attractor of backward-propagating solitons, accessible at low pump power in a thermally stable manner within the blue-detuned regime. The conflicting requirements for broadband spectra and low-noise single-soliton formation are reconciled, even in microwave-repetition-rate resonators, which otherwise are prone to uncontrollable multi-soliton formation. These results highlight the potential to achieve previously incompatible characteristics in nonlinear photonic systems through hybrid-dispersion attractor shaping.