Coherently Driven Temporal Solitons in Fiber Resonators

Driven solitons are short optical pulses that propagate indefinitely in optical resonators. They are currently attracting a lot of attention both for their fundamental interest and potential applications in metrology and spectroscopy. The term “driven” comes from the coherent, continuous wave-injected source, which provides energy to the soliton via phase-sensitive processes. This makes them significantly different from laser solitons (sustained through incoherent gain) and strongly connects them to other fields of science such as hydrodynamics and plasma physics.

Until recently, most results have focused on passive cavities with a driving laser at the soliton carrier frequency. However, it is now well known that this configuration is strongly limited in terms of energy conversion (pump to output soliton), and several recent proposals have been made to increase the output power.

In this webinar hosted by the Lasers in Manufacturing Technical Group, François Leo will discuss the history of coherent soliton generation, their potential for applications and limitations. Leo will then discuss our recent results on novel types of driven solitons, such as solitons in laser cavities pumped below the lasing threshold and solitons in degenerate optical parametric oscillators.

What You Will Learn:
• Kerr solitons
• Optical frequency combs
• Physics and applications of optical parametric oscillators

Who Should Attend:
• Students
• Early career scientists

About the Presenter: François Leo from Université libre de Bruxelles

François received his PhD, entitled “experimental and theoretical study of dissipative structures in optical resonators”, from the University of Brussels in 2010. After a couple of postdoctoral stays, in Ghent and Auckland, he came back to Brussels to lead his own research team.He is currently leading a full-scale effort to both understand the dynamics of nonlinear resonators and generate novel optical sources for spectroscopy and ranging.