Ultrashort optical pulses play a vital role in a wide range of industrial and scientific applications including telecommunication networks, biological imaging, spectroscopy, metrology such as LiDAR, and advanced material processing solutions. In the last two decades, silicon photonics, that is the integration of complex optical systems using optical waveguide structures which are fabricated on a silicon wafer using standard semiconductor mass fabrication processes have revolutionized the field of photonics. Over the last five years increasing efforts have been put forward to build ultra-short pulsed lasers and frequency combs with silicon photonics technology. One of the most promising avenues are so called dissipative Kerr solitons (DKSs), which form in high-Q dielectric optical microresonators that are coherently driven with a continuous wave or long pump laser. The interplay of anomalous chromatic dispersion and the Kerr-type third order nonlinearity stabilizes a short soliton pulse. Many systems of optical microresonators have been shown to support soliton generation so far. Most importantly, several planar integrated optical waveguide systems such as silicon nitride, lithium niobate, tantalum oxide and a range of III-V semiconductor waveguide systems have been shown to support DKS generation. The pulse duration and spectral envelope of such soliton microcombs is determined by the dispersion landscape of the supporting microresonator system. Embedded into such a background, the project “Development of compact single-cycle light sources (CoSiLiS)” aimed to tap the potential of soliton microcombs to generate ultrashort single-cycle light fields and demonstrate super-octave spanning and single-cycle pulse generation directly from a photonic microresonator.
