Project description
Delivering ultrashort light pulses in the single-cycle regime
Ultrashort optical pulses are important tools in a wide range of applications. With lengths measuring picoseconds or less, they enable high-precision frequency measurements, material analyses, medical procedures and fast optical communications, amongst others. Funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the CoSiLiS project will delivered ultrashort pulses in the single-cycle regime, which refers to temporal durations as short as a single cycle (the oscillation period of the optical carrier wave). The project tapped into the potential of soliton microcombs. Dissipative Kerr solitons form in high-Q dielectric optical microresonators that are coherently driven by a continuous-wave or a long pump laser. Such ultrafast and broadband light sources have tremendous implications for spectroscopy in the biological and chemical sciences.
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.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF-EF-ST - Standard EFCoordinator
1015 Lausanne
Switzerland