Experimental observation of cavity soliton states in silica microspheres

Temporal cavity solitons (CSs) are pulses of light that can persist in an optical cavity without any change to their shape or energy, and in the spectral domain correspond to highly coherent frequency combs. Cavity solitons were recently demonstrated for the first time in crystalline microresonators [1], and have subsequently been reported in a number of other resonator platforms [2-4], further establishing microresonators as a viable alternative to commercial mode-locked laser sources of ultrashort pulses and frequency combs. Cavity solitons arise from a noisy and unstable background; as a result, the number of cavity solitons generated each time the state is accessed is expected to be random, with a distribution determined solely by the resonator and driving parameters.