Solitary structures and optical frequency combs in a ring quantum cascade laser

Abstract

We use a prototypical model based on the Complex Ginzburg Landau Equation to study the dynamics of a multimode ring quantum cascade laser. We predict the existence and stability of different classes of localized structures in the system. In presence of coherent injection, we report the formation dissipative Temporal Solitons (TSs) which manifest multi-stability and coexistence with a stable CW solution. We show how these features allow for external manipulation of the spectral content of the optical frequency combs associated with TSs with a big impact on applications in the field of e.g. high precision spectroscopy and wireless communications.