Kerr breather-soliton time crystals

Abstract

Breather solitons in passive, driven, Kerr-nonlinear optical resonators are circulating pulses of light that have amplitude, bandwidth, and duration that oscillate in time over the course of many resonator round trips. These breather oscillations emerge spontaneously, and their frequency is determined by the system parameters. Here we propose and theoretically investigate the possibility that these breather oscillations may become subharmonically entrained to the periodic perturbation occurring at the resonator round-trip time $T_R$ that arises from out-coupling and pumping. The result of subharmonic entrainment is an integer ratio $T_b/T_R=N\gg1$ between the breather period $T_b$ and the round-trip time. We find that in a regime of intermediate resonator finesse ($\mathcal{F}\sim30-40$), rigid subharmonic entrainment---or locking of the breather oscillation to the round-trip time---occurs and is maintained over a range of system parameters. We observe entrainment with an integer locking ratio as high as $N=20$, and propose a way to realize the effect with higher entrainment ratios and at higher finesse. This system's subharmonic response to governing equations that are invariant under discrete time translations is similar to recently proposed and reported discrete time crystals in quantum many-body systems. We discuss a route towards realization of these breather-soliton time crystals in experiment, and explain how their incorporation into photonics systems could simplify proposed applications of microresonator solitons. Importantly, our work explores a new regime of microresonator Kerr-nonlinear dynamics in which the round-trip-time perturbation plays a significant role.