CoSiLiS · Developement of compact single-cycle light sources

The main objective of the CoSiLiS research action is developement and exploitation of light sources delivering ultrashort pulses in the single-cycle regime, i.e. the pulse envelope duration is no longer than a single oscillation of the optical carrier wave. This will be achieved using recently discovered temporal dissipative soliton formation in microresonators with high optical Q-factors and anomalous dispersion. The ultrashort pulse formation is guided by the strong Kerr nonlinearity in tight confinement waveguide structures. Balancing the parametric nonlinear gain and the waveguide loss along with the nonlinear pulse compression and dispersive pulse spreading in the resonator leads to the formation of soliton pulse trains with repetition rates in the microwave to terahertz spectral region. Advanced dispersion engineering techniques, such as hybrid strip-slot waveguides will be implemented to generate fully coherent pulse trains with super-octave spectral bandwidth directly from a continous-wave laser in the integrated photonics platform and compress them to pulse durations equivalent a single optical cycle of the carrier wave. Such ultrafast and broadband light sources bear tremendous application potential in biological and chemical spectroscopy applications. Furthermore, the proposed research action aims to bridge the topical fields of attosecond science and integrated photonics by providing sources of ultrafast phase controlled photonic waveforms capable of initiating and probing dynamics on the one-femtosecond timescale of its asymetric electric field crests. As a proof-of-principle experiment we intend to measure light-field driven electric currents at microwave repetition rates using an integrated photonics source.