Weakly Dispersive Band in Synthetic Moiré Superlattice Inducing Optimal Compact Comb Generation

The moiré superlattices attract growing interest for holding exotic physics due to their fascinating properties from electronics to photonics. Much attention has been focused on the localization effect for waves in the flat band regime or the delocalization effect from the strongly dispersive band feature. Here, we study the weakly dispersive band in between the two above scenarios in a one-dimensional synthetic frequency moiré superlattice and observe the wave packet distributions therein toward novel frequency comb generation. Mode spacing in the spectral wave packet is reduced compared to the free spectral range of individual rings due to the mode couplings from the unequal sublattice periods of the synthetic moiré lattice. We unveil that the optimal compact frequency comb generation occurs in the weakly dispersive regime holding simultaneously uniform power distribution and broad frequency spanning in our experiment, benefiting from the interplay between the band flatness and power uniformity of mode distribution. Our results study the fundamental physics of the weakly dispersive moiré band in the synthetic frequency dimension and also show a new way for the future compact frequency comb generation in on-chip devices with small footprint size.