Integrated vortex soliton microcombs

Abstract The frequency and orbital angular momentum (OAM) 1,2 are independent physical properties of light that both offer unbounded degrees of freedom. However, creating, processing, and detecting high-dimensional OAM states have been a pivot and long-lasting task, as the complexity of the required optical systems scales up drastically with the OAM dimension 3 . On the other hand, mature toolboxes — such as optical frequency combs — have been developed in the frequency domain for parallel measurements with excellent fidelity 4 . Here we correlate the two dimensions into an equidistant comb structure on a photonic chip. Dissipative optical solitons formed in a nonlinear microresonator 5 are emitted through the engraved angular gratings with each comb line carrying distinct OAM 6 . Such one-to-one correspondence between the OAM and frequencies manifests state-of-the-art extinction ratios over 18.5 dB, enabling precision spectroscopy of optical vortices. The demonstrated vortex soliton microcombs provide coherent light sources that are multiplexed in the spatial and frequency domain, having the potential to establish a new modus operandi of high-dimensional structured light.