The nonlinear physics dynamics of temporal dissipative solitons in a microcavity hinder them from attaining high power from pump lasers with a typical nonlinear energy conversion efficiency of less than 1%. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a straightforward method for improving the output power of soliton combs using a silica microrod cavity with high coupling strength, large mode volume, and high-Q factor, resulting in a low-repetition-rate dissipative soliton (∼21GHz) with an energy conversion efficiency exceeding 20%. Furthermore, by generating an ∼105GHz5×FSR (free spectral range) soliton crystal comb in the microcavity, the energy conversion efficiency can be further increased up to 56%.

We demonstrate a novel method to control the free spectral range (FSR) of silica micro-rod resonators precisely. This method is accomplished by iteratively applying laser annealing on the already-fabricated micro-rod resonators. Fine and repeatable increasing of resonator FSR is demonstrated, and the best resolution is smaller than 5 MHz, while the resonator quality-factor is only slightly affected by the iterative annealing procedure. Using the fabricated micro-rod resonators, single dissipative Kerr soliton microcombs are generated, and soliton repetition frequencies are tuned precisely by the iterative annealing process. The demonstrated method can be used for dual-comb spectroscopy and coherent optical communications.