Fig. 1: Concept and illustrative numerical simulations.
From: Spontaneous symmetry breaking of dissipative optical solitons in a two-component Kerr resonator
a Schematic illustration, showing a passive Kerr resonator whose two orthogonal (polarization) eigenmodes are symmetrically excited. b Numerical simulation results, showing the evolution of the integrated intracavity energy contained in cavity mode E1 (blue curve) and E2 (orange curve) as the detuning Δ is linearly increased. The energies part at the “soliton step”, revealing SSB. c, d Evolution of the intracavity temporal intensity profiles corresponding to modes E1 and E2, respectively, as the detuning is changed; e shows the corresponding evolution of the total intensity. f, g Top panels show snapshots of the modal intensity profiles at detunings indicated with gray dashed lines in (b)–(e), whilst the bottom panels show the corresponding total intensity. All the results shown were extracted from the same numerical simulation with total driving intensity X = 4.5 and cross-coupling coefficient B = 1.6 similar to the experiments that follow. The colorbar represents the full modal intensities in (c) and (d) and half of the total intensity in (e).
