Observation of Breathing Dark Pulses in Normal Dispersion Optical Microresonators

Breathers are localized waves in nonlinear systems that undergo a periodic variation in time or space. The concept of breathers is useful for describing many nonlinear physical systems including granular lattices, Bose-Einstein condensates, hydrodynamics, plasmas, and optics. In optics, breathers can exist in either the anomalous or the normal dispersion regimes, but they have only been characterized in the former, to our knowledge. Here, externally pumped optical microresonators are used to characterize the breathing dynamics of localized waves in the normal dispersion regime. High-Q optical microresonators featuring normal dispersion can yield mode-locked Kerr combs whose time-domain waveform corresponds to circulating dark pulses in the cavity. We show that with relatively high pump power these Kerr combs can enter a breathing regime, in which the time-domain waveform remains a dark pulse but experiences a periodic modulation on a time scale much slower than the microresonator round trip time. The breathing is observed in the optical frequency domain as a significant difference in the phase and amplitude of the modulation experienced by different spectral lines. In the highly pumped regime, a transition to a chaotic breathing state where the waveform remains dark-pulse-like is also observed, for the first time to our knowledge; such a transition is reversible by reducing the pump power.