Turnkey photonic flywheel in a microresonator-filtered laser

Mingming Nie; Jonathan Musgrave; Kunpeng Jia; Jan Bartos; Shining Zhu; Zhenda Xie; Shu-Wei Huang

doi:10.1038/s41467-023-44314-8

Turnkey photonic flywheel in a microresonator-filtered laser

Nat Commun. 2024 Jan 2;15(1):55. doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-44314-8.

Authors

Mingming Nie¹, Jonathan Musgrave², Kunpeng Jia³, Jan Bartos², Shining Zhu⁴, Zhenda Xie⁵, Shu-Wei Huang⁶

Affiliations

¹ Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, Colorado, 80309, USA. mingming.nie@colorado.edu.
² Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, Colorado, 80309, USA.
³ National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures, School of Electronic Science and Engineering, College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, School of Physics, and Collaborative Innovation Center of Advanced Microstructures, Nanjing University, 210093, Nanjing, China. jiakunpeng@nju.edu.cn.
⁴ National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures, School of Electronic Science and Engineering, College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, School of Physics, and Collaborative Innovation Center of Advanced Microstructures, Nanjing University, 210093, Nanjing, China.
⁵ National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures, School of Electronic Science and Engineering, College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, School of Physics, and Collaborative Innovation Center of Advanced Microstructures, Nanjing University, 210093, Nanjing, China. xiezhenda@nju.edu.cn.
⁶ Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, Colorado, 80309, USA. shuwei.huang@colorado.edu.

Abstract

Dissipative Kerr soliton (DKS) microcomb has emerged as an enabling technology that revolutionizes a wide range of applications in both basic science and technological innovation. Reliable turnkey operation with sub-optical-cycle and sub-femtosecond timing jitter is key to the success of many intriguing microcomb applications at the intersection of ultrafast optics and microwave electronics. Here we propose an approach and demonstrate the first turnkey Brillouin-DKS frequency comb to the best of our knowledge. Our microresonator-filtered laser design offers essential benefits, including phase insensitivity, self-healing capability, deterministic selection of the DKS state, and access to the ultralow noise comb state. The demonstrated turnkey Brillouin-DKS frequency comb achieves a fundamental comb linewidth of 100 mHz and DKS timing jitter of 1 femtosecond for averaging times up to 56 μs. The approach is universal and generalizable to various device platforms for user-friendly and field-deployable comb devices.

Grants and funding

R21 EB029541/EB/NIBIB NIH HHS/United States