Dissipative Kerr combs in microresonators: From chaos to solitons

Optical frequency combs, generated with mode-locked femtosecond lasers and microstructured fibers produced in recent years a revolution in metrology and experimental physics. A new phenomenon of nonlinear optics was discovered recently - spontaneous formation of similar combs in passive optical microresonators with continuous wave pumping. Such microresonator Kerr combs result from multiple hyper-parametric four-wave mixing processes. The report presents the results of recent theoretical and experimental studies, leading to the development of compact and integrated coherent frequency comb sources.