Experimental Observation of Optical Frequency Combs in Doubly Resonant Second Harmonic Generation

Continuously-driven microresonators, whose nonlinear response is dominated by the third-order Kerr nonlinearity, have proven to be valid alternatives to comb sources based on femtosecond mode-locked lasers . More recenlty, the direct generation of optical frequency combs (OFCs) entirely through quadratic interactions has also been demonstrated in singly resonant cavity second harmonic generation (SHG) and in cw pumped nearly degenerate optical parametric oscillation. Interestingly, theoretical studies on doubly resonant cavity SHG predicted the emergence of OFCs with a much lower threshold with respect to the singly resonant configurations, as well as rich nonlinear dynamics.