Optical micro resonators made from silicon nitride on a chip using for soliton based communications. â’ V. Brasch (LPQM, EPFL)
Researchers from EPFL and Karlsruhe Institute of Technologyâ?use a soliton frequency combs from optical microresonators to transmit data at speeds of more than 50 terabits per second. Optical solitons are special wave packages that propagate without changing their shape. They are ubiquitous in nature, and occur in Plasma Physics, water waves to biological systems. While solitons also exist in optical fiber, discovered at Bell labs in the 1980â?'ies, there technological use so far has been limited. While researchers studied their use for optical communication, eventually the approach was abandoned. Now, a collaboration of a research group at KITâ''s Institute of Photonics and Quantum Electronics (IPQ) and Institute of Microstructure Technology (IMT) with EPFLâ''s Laboratory of Photonics and Quantum Measurements (LPQM) have shown that solitons may experience a comeback: Instead of using a train of soliton pulses in an optical fiber, they generated continuously circulating optical solitons in compact silicon nitride optical microresonators. These continuously circulating solitons lead to broadband optical frequency combs.
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