Excitation and manipulation of super cavity solitons in multi-stable passive Kerr resonators

Abstract: We report on the theoretical analysis as well as the numerical simulations about the nonlinear dynamics of cavity solitons in a passive Kerr resonator operating in the multistable regime under the condition of a sufficiently strong pump. In this regime, the adjacent tilted cavity resonances might overlap, thus leading to the co-existence of combinatory states of temporal cavity solitons and the extended modulation instability patterns. Very interestingly, the cavity in the regime of multistablity may sustain distinct families of cavity solitons, vividly termed as super cavity solitons with much higher intensity and broader spectra if compared with those in the conventional bi-stable regime. The description of such complex cavity dynamics in the multstable regime requires either the infinite-dimensional Ikeda map, or the derived mean-field coupled Lugiato-Lefever equations by involving the contributing cavity resonances. With the latter model, for the first time, we revealed the existence of different orders of super cavity solitons, whose stationary solutions were obtained by using the Newton-Raphson algorithm. Along this line, with the continuation calculation, we have plotted the Hopf / saddle-node bifurcation curves, thus identifying the existing map of the stable and breathing (super) cavity solitons. With this defined parameter space, we have proposed an efficient method to excite and switch the super cavity solitons by adding an appropriate intensity (or phase) perturbation on the pump. Such deterministic cavity soliton manipulation technique is demonstrated to underpin the multi-level coding, which may enable the large capacity all-optical buffering based on the passive fiber ring cavities.