Bloch oscillations of coherently driven dissipative solitons in a synthetic dimension

International audienceWe investigate theoretically and experimentally the instabilities of symmetry-broken, vectorial, bright cavity solitons of two-mode nonlinear passive Kerr resonators. Through comprehensive theoretical analyses of coupled Lugiato-Lefever equations, we identify two different breathing regimes where the two components of the vectorial cavity solitons breathe respectively in-phase and out-of-phase. Moreover, we find that deep out-of-phase breathing can lead to intermittent self-switching of the two components, spontaneously transforming a soliton into its mirror-symmetric state. In this process, solitons are also sometimes observed to decay. All our theoretical predictions are confirmed in experiments performed in an optical fiber ring resonator, where cavity soliton symmetry breaking occurs across the polarization modes of the resonator. To the best of our knowledge, our study constitutes the first experimental report of breathing instabilities of multi-component optical solitons of driven nonlinear resonators