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Soliton self-excitation under pulsed driving in a Kerr resonator

Matthew Macnaughtan1,2,*, Zongda Li1,2, Yiqing Xu1,2, Xiaoming Wei3, Zhongmin Yang3, Stéphane Coen1,2, Miro Erkintalo1,2, and Stuart G. Murdoch1,2

  • *Contact author: matthew.macnaughtan@auckland.ac.nz
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Phys. Rev. Research 7, 043250 – Published 3 December, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/v9wr-dv9y

Abstract

We present a regime of cavity soliton (CS) excitation in a Kerr resonator driven by a train of desynchronized 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 desynchronization 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 multisoliton bound states. We believe that this research offers a promising approach to considerably simplify cavity soliton generation in both macro- and microscale Kerr resonators while also offering greatly increased thermal, power, and nonlinear efficiencies intrinsic to pulsed-driven systems.

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Phys. Rev. Research 7, 043250– Published 3 December, 2025
  • Received 26 May 2025
  • Accepted 2 October 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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