SITES · Cavity solitons in time-multiplexed resonators

A temporal Kerr cavity soliton (CS) is an optical pulse that propagates undistributed in a low-loss passive resonator. As part of its energy periodically escapes the resonator at each roundtrip, it forms a pulse train. Owing to their ultra-high stability compared to the pulses generated by mode-locked lasers, CSs are expected to play a crucial role in the future of atomic clocks, frequency combs, and high-precision metrology. Besides their inherent stability, they exhibit particle-like behavior. In particular, a couple of CSs can interact in the resonator and eventually form a bound state. Depending on the interaction, such coupled states can be more robust than the single-CS state itself. The aim of SITES (Solitons in time-multiplexed resonators) is to study, theoretically and experimentally, how temporal couplings within an optical resonator lead to the emergence of dynamic behaviors and cavity solitons that do not occur otherwise. On the applied side, SITES can give rise to a new kind of ultra-stable pulse train. On the fundamental front, SITES aims to investigate how these couplings between CSs can be leveraged for computational purposes and used to simulate specific crystal lattices. Such synthetic lattice combined with particle-like CSs leads to a fertile ground for the investigation of nonlinear effects in bosonic systems. Despite these strong fundamental and applied reasons, versatile couplings between multiple CSs have not been experimentally explored so far, mainly because the significant losses arising from the couplings prohibit reaching the intriguing nonlinear regimes. The experimental approach of SITES will overcome such a challenge and enables the realization of previously inaccessible coupled CSs.