Soliton self-excitation under pulsed driving in a Kerr resonator

Abstract: We present a novel regime of cavity soliton excitation in a Kerr resonator driven by a train of desynchronised pulses. In this regime, the soliton solution is shown to be the sole available state for the intracavity field, allowing for the automatic excitation of single solitons without the application of any external perturbations or parameter ramping. The self-excitation of cavity soliton frequency combs is validated through numerical continuation of the Lugiato-Lefever equation, direct numerical integration, and experimental observation. We show that this regime of CS self-excitation requires only the cavity detuning and pump desynchronisation parameters to be set within the correct range, thus considerably simplifying the usually complex task of deterministic cavity soliton excitation. Additionally, we show that this procedure can also be extended to allow the deterministic generation of different families of multi-soliton bound-states. We believe this research offers a promising approach to considerably simplify cavity soliton generation in both macro- and micro- scale Kerr resonators, while also offering greatly increased thermal, power, and nonlinear efficiencies intrinsic to pulsed-driven systems.