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The Eckhaus instability is a secondary instability of nonlinear spatiotemporal patterns in which high-wave-number periodic solutions become unstable against small-wave-number perturbations. Here we show that this instability can take place in Kerr combs corresponding to subcritical Turing patterns upon changes in the laser detuning. The development of the Eckhaus instability leads to the cracking of patterns and a long-lived transient where the peaks of the pattern rearrange in space due to spatial interactions. In the spectral domain, this results in a metastable Kerr comb dynamics with timescales that can be larger than 1 min. This time is, at least, seven orders of magnitude larger than the intracavity photon lifetime and is in sharp contrast with all the transient behaviors reported so far in cavity nonlinear optics that are typically only a few photon lifetimes long (i.e., in the picosecond to the microsecond range). This phenomenology, studied theoretically in the Lugiato-Lefever model and the observed dynamics is compatible with experimental observations in Kerr combs generated in ultra-high-Q whispering-gallery mode resonators., D.G. and Y.K.C. acknowledge support from Project ND-PHOT jointly funded by CSIC and CNRS. D.G. and P.C. acknowledge financial support from Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI, Spain) and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional under Project ESoTECoS, Grant No. FIS2015-63628-C2-1-R (AEI/FEDER,UE) and Agencia Estatal de Investigación through the María de Maeztu Program for Units of Excellence in R&D (Grant No. MDM-2017-0711). Y.K.C. also acknowledges funding from the European Research Council through the Projects NextPhase and Versyt from the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) through Project SHYRO. PPR acknowledges funding from the H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions through the Project NOSTER (101023717).

International audience; Kerr comb generation is usually based on the nonlinear dynamics of the intracavity field in a whispering-gallery-mode resonator pumped by a continuous-wave laser. However, using a pulsed instead of a continuous-wave pump opens an alternative research avenue from both the theoretical and experimental viewpoints, as it permits us to tailor the spectral properties of ultrashort pulse trains with a single passive nonlinear element. In this article we study the dynamics of Kerr optical frequency combs when the whispering-gallery-mode resonator is pumped by a synchronous pulse train. We propose a model that is based on an extension of the Lugiato-Lefever equation, which accounts for both the pulsed nature of the pump and the mismatch between the free-spectral range of the resonator and the repetition rate of the pulse train. We lay a particular emphasis on the effect of pump-cavity desynchronization on the spectral shape of the output combs. The numerical simulations are successfully compared with experimental measurements where the optical pulses are generated via time-lens soliton compression, and the resonator is a millimeter-size magnesium fluoride resonator with a billion quality factor at the pump wavelength.

We introduce a high-brightness and high-visibility source to generate and manipulate high-dimensional frequency-bin entangled photon pairs, using photonic circuit integrable components. We demonstrate, with this source, the antibunching effect in high-dimensional space.

International audience; The quantum properties of optical frequency combs have been the focus of several research works in recent years. Investigating the quantum correlations between the spectral components of the combs is of fundamental interest because it allows for a better understanding of light-matter interactions, but also of technological interest as it wold permits the implementation of quantum communication networks. In this communication, we present some of our latest advances in this field.

International audience; This article reports on the design and characterization of a high-overtone bulk acoustic wave resonator (HBAR)-oscillator-based 4.596 GHz frequency source. A 2.298 GHz signal, generated by an oscillator constructed around a thermally controlled two-port aluminum nitride-sapphire HBAR resonator with a Q-factor of 24 000 at 68 ◦C, is frequency multiplied by 2–4.596 GHz, half of the Cs atom clock frequency. The temperature coefficient of frequency of the HBAR is measured to be −23 ppm/ ◦C at 2.298 GHz. The measured phase noise of the 4.596 GHz source is −105 dB rad2/Hz at 1 kHz offset and −150 dB rad2/Hz at 100 kHz offset. The 4.596 GHz output signal is used as a local oscillator in a laboratory-prototype Cs microcell-based coherent population trapping atomic clock. The signal is stabilized onto the atomic transition frequency by tuning finely a voltage-controlled phase shifter implemented in the 2.298 GHz HBAR-oscillator loop, preventing the need for a high-power-consuming direct digital synthesis. The short-term fractional frequency stability of the free-running oscillator is 1.8 × 10−9 at one second integration time. In locked regime, the latter is improved in a preliminary proof-of-concept experiment at the level of 6.6 × 10−11 τ−1/2 up to a few seconds and found to be limited by the signal-to-noise ratio of the detected CPT resonance.