Fig. 3: Experimental observation of CS symmetry breaking.
From: Spontaneous symmetry breaking of dissipative optical solitons in a two-component Kerr resonator
a Slow photodetector signals measured along the two cavity modes when scanning the laser frequency across a resonance. The experimental parameters are similar to the ones used to obtain the simulation results in Fig. 1: X = 4.5 and B = 1.6. b Intracavity intensity profiles measured with fast photodetectors (and subsequently sinc-interpolated), showing (b) asymmetric solitons at a detuning of Δ = 3.9 and (c) symmetric solitons at a detuning of Δ = 6.5. d Optical spectrum of one of the symmetry-broken CS states. The soliton is predominantly polarized along the “blue mode” (E1), but exhibits a small component along the orthogonal “orange mode” (E2). Also shown as open circles is the spectrum expected for a 2.7 ps hyperbolic secant CS. e Experimentally measured (blue solid circles) and theoretically predicted (black solid curve) ratio of the soliton intensity along the two polarization modes for a “blue mode” dominated CS as a function of detuning. The horizontal error bars represent an estimated ± 0.2 uncertainty in the detuning whilst the vertical error bars represent the standard deviation of multiple measurements (see Methods). The theoretical curve in (e) was obtained from the bifurcation data shown in Fig. 2a.
