CoSiLiS · Developement of compact single-cycle light sources
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2019-04-01 → 2021-03-31
- EU contribution
- €191,149
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Developement of compact single-cycle light sources
Ultrashort optical pulses play a vital role in a wide range of industrial and scientific applications including telecommunication networks, biological imaging, spectroscopy, metrology such as LiDAR, and advanced material processing solutions. In the last two decades, silicon photonics, that is the integration of complex optical systems using optical waveguide structures which are fabricated on a silicon wafer using standard semiconductor mass fabrication processes have revolutionized the field of photonics. Over the last five years increasing efforts have been put forward to build ultra-short pulsed lasers and frequency combs with silicon photonics technology. One of the most promising avenues are so called dissipative Kerr solitons (DKSs), which form in high-Q dielectric optical microresonators that are coherently driven with a continuous wave or long pump laser. The interplay of anomalous chromatic dispersion and the Kerr-type third order nonlinearity stabilizes a short soliton pulse. Many systems of optical microresonators have been shown to support soliton generation so far. Most importantly, several planar integrated optical waveguide systems such as silicon nitride, lithium niobate, tantalum oxide and a range of III-V semiconductor waveguide systems have been shown to support DKS generation. The pulse duration and spectral envelope of such soliton microcombs is determined by the dispersion landscape of the supporting microresonator system. Embedded into such a background, the project “Development of compact single-cycle light sources (CoSiLiS)” aimed to tap the potential of soliton microcombs to generate ultrashort single-cycle light fields and demonstrate super-octave spanning and single-cycle pulse generation directly from a photonic microresonator.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
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.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- ECOLE POLYTECHNIQUE FEDERALE DE LAUSANNE · LausanneCoordinatorSwitzerland
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union