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.

Microcomb generation with simultaneous χ(2) and χ(3) nonlinearities brings new possibilities for ultrabroadband and potentially self-referenced integrated comb sources. However, the evolution of the intracavity field involving multiple nonlinear processes shows complex dynamics that are still poorly understood. Here, we report on strong soliton regulation induced by fundamental–second-harmonic (FD-SH) mode coupling. The formation of solitons from chaos is extensively investigated based on coupled Lugiato–Lefever equations. The soliton generation shows more deterministic behaviors in the presence of FD-SH mode interaction, which is in sharp contrast with the usual cases where the soliton number and relative locations are stochastic. Deterministic single soliton transition, soliton binding, and prohibition are observed, depending on the phase-matching condition and coupling coefficient between the fundamental and second-harmonic waves. Our finding provides important new insights into the soliton dynamics in microcavities with simultaneous χ(2) and χ(3) nonlinearities and can be immediate guidance for broadband soliton comb generation with such platforms.

We introduce a nanoscale photonic platform based on gallium phosphide. Owing to the favorable material properties, peak power intensity levels of 50 GW/cm2 are safely reached in a suspended membrane. Consequently, the field enhancement is exploited to a far greater extent to achieve efficient and strong light–matter interaction. As an example, parametric interactions are shown to reach a deeply nonlinear regime, revealing cascaded four-wave mixing leading to comb generation and high-order soliton dynamics.

Spectral anti-crossings between the fundamental guided mode and core-wall resonances alter the dispersion in hollow-core anti-resonant-reflection photonic crystal fibers. Here we study the effect of this dispersion change on the nonlinear propagation and dynamics of ultrashort pulses. We find that it causes emission of narrow spectral peaks through a combination of four-wave mixing and dispersive wave emission. We further investigate the influence of the anti-crossings on nonlinear pulse propagation and show that their impact can be minimized by adjusting the core-wall thickness in such a way that the anti-crossings lie spectrally distant from the pump wavelength.

We report a regime of the loose soliton bunch in an erbium-doped passively mode-locked fiber laser. In this state, every soliton bunch consists of multiple pulses. The amount of multiple pulses inside the soliton bunch increase as the pump power rises. Moreover, the temporal average pulse-to-pulse separation decreases in general with the increase of the pump power. Further, the spatial-temporal sequences based on the dispersive Fourier transformation technique show that pulse-to-pulse interactions and time jitter can result in pulse forking inside the soliton bunch. Finally, we theoretically demonstrate the soliton bunch with different pulse-to-pulse separations.

The pulse dynamics of harmonic mode-locking in a dissipative soliton resonance (DSR) region in an erbium-doped fiber ring laser is investigated at different values of anomalous dispersion. The fiber laser is mode-locked by a nonlinear polarization rotation technique. By inserting 0–200 m anomalous dispersion single-mode fiber in the laser cavity, the cavity length is changed from 17.3 to 217.3 m, and the corresponding dispersion of the cavity ranges from ?0.27 to ?4.67 ps2. The observed results show that the tuning range of repetition rate under a harmonic DSR condition is highly influenced by the cavity dispersion. Furthermore, it is found that, by automatically adjusting their harmonic orders, the lasers can work at certain values of repetition rate, which are independent of the cavity length and dispersion. The pulses at the same repetition rate in different laser configurations have similar properties, demonstrating that each achievable repetition rate represents an operation regime of harmonic DSR lasers.