Effect of Heating on the Generation and Properties of Platicons in High-Q Optical Microresonators

Pumping a high-Q optical microresonator by an external laser is inevitably associated with thermal effects. They have a significant impact on the dynamics of nonlinear processes in such structures, including the generation of optical frequency combs and dissipative solitons. The generation process and the properties of bright solitons in such heated microresonators with anomalous group velocity dispersion (GVD) have been well studied, and a number of methods have been developed to minimize the effect of thermal processes. However, for dark solitons or platicons excited at normal GVD, these issues have been studied significantly less. In this work, the properties of platicons in heated microresonators are analyzed, and it is shown that in the case of “positive” thermal effects, when the direction of the thermal shift of the resonance frequencies of a microresonator coincides with the direction of the nonlinear shift, the widest high-energy platicons with the duration close to the round trip time in the resonator are stable. In the case of “negative” thermal effects, narrow low-energy platicons remain stable. Moreover, in microresonators with “negative” thermal effects, the interaction between cubic nonlinear and thermal processes can ensure the generation of platicons without special techniques required in other cases.