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arXiv · 2005.01411

Self-switching Kerr oscillations of counter-propagating light in microresonators

Michael T. M. Woodley·Lewis Hill·Leonardo Del Bino·Gian-Luca Oppo·Pascal Del'Haye
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Abstract

We report the experimental observation of oscillatory antiphase switching between counter-propagating light beams in Kerr ring microresonators, including the emergence of periodic behaviour from a chaotic regime. Self-switching occurs in balanced regimes of operation and is well captured by a simple coupled dynamical system featuring only the self- and cross-phase Kerr nonlinearities. Switching phenomena are due to temporal instabilities of symmetry-broken states combined with attractor merging that restores the broken symmetry on average. Self-switching of counter-propagating light is robust for realising controllable, all-optical generation of waveforms, signal encoding and chaotic cryptography.

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Michael T. M. Woodley, Lewis Hill, Leonardo Del Bino, Gian-Luca Oppo, Pascal Del'Haye. 2020-05-04. Self-switching Kerr oscillations of counter-propagating light in microresonators. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.126.043901

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