Demonstration of spontaneous symmetry breaking in self-modulated ring resonators

Abstract

The demonstration of spontaneous symmetry breaking in a system consisting of a pair of self-modulated ring resonators is performed. In addition, the critical effect of thermal heating induced by optical absorption is studied, where experimental results with numerical calculations reveal that optical absorption contributing as an optical nonlinearity is greatly dominant over the optical Kerr effect under certain operation speeds, depicting a significant impact on the system performance. Our analysis of the operation characteristics outlines important characteristics of self-modulated nonlinear resonators and their function as an optical binary state system.