Laser cavity solitons and turing patterns in microresonator filtered lasers: Properties and perspectives

Abstract

Turing patterns and solitons are a common occurrence in systems that are out of equilibrium. For example, they regulate the emergence of organised structures in biology and chemistry. In optics, the study of temporal Turing rolls and cavity-solitons in nonlinear micro-cavity resonators has been key to the understanding of optical frequency comb formation in these structures. Over a decade, the impact of microresonator-based approaches to generating frequency combs – so-called “Micro-combs or “Kerr combs” – has reached far beyond metrology applications. Here we summarise our theoretical and experimental results for solitons and Turing patterns in a system comprising a micro-resonator nested in an auxiliary fibre-gain cavity.