Self-Starting Temporal Cavity Solitons in a Laser-based Microcomb

Microcombs are optical frequency combs based on microcavity resonators [1] . They find multiple applications, including metrology, spectroscopy, frequency synthesis, and optical communications. Temporal cavity solitons (TCS), the temporal counterpart of spatial cavity solitons [2] , have been shown to produce microcombs with optimal spectral features [1] and are well modeled by the Lugiato-Lefever equation in passive systems. High contrast TCS can be also obtained in active systems inclusive of laser gain [3] .