Dissipative Solitons in a Coherently Driven Active Fiber Ring Cavity

Optical frequency combs (OFCs) are lightwaves composed of a large number of equidistant spectral lines. They are important for metrology, spectroscopy, telecommunications and basic science [1] . OFCs are most often generated by mode-locked lasers (MLLs) or high-Q passive resonators [2] , although both systems have important drawbacks. MLLs are able to produce high power OFC, but are affected by the Gordon-Haus effect [3] , which leads to slight alterations of the repetition rate. In coherently driven passive high-Q resonators, the carrier frequency is locked to the driving laser, hence the repetition rate is constant. However, only a small power fraction can be extracted from the resonator. Very recently, new devices that combine the best of both configurations have been proposed [4] - [6] .