Here are a few numbers to summarize 2017. From W23 to the end, I listed around 75 papers on Kerr frequency combs in the Publication Updates (manuscripts can appear twice with an Arxiv and a published version). According to Google Scholar, there are 164 hits for “Kerr frequency comb” in papers from 2017. For “microresonator frequency comb” there are still 74 hits. Searching in article title, abstract and keywords Scopus lists for 2017 43 publications for “Kerr frequency comb” and 17 publications for “microresonator frequency comb”. Compared to 2016, these numbers did not change significantly. Apparently this means that after a close to doubled output in 2016 compared to 2015 (Google Scholar), this strong growth period is over and the field has a high but steady output.
According to Web of Science, at least 3 papers of the ones published in 2017 on Kerr frequency combs made it into the Highly Cited category (top 1%) of the field of Physics (many other older papers are in there as well). Taking the 5% ratio of these 3 Highly Cited papers out of approximately 60 papers published in 2017 (Scopus) this shows that the field is probably cited significantly above average. If only looking at the typically highest ranked journals there was one publication in Nature, one in Science, three in Nature Photonics and one in Nature Physics.
Some current numbers for the most cited papers of the field: the original paper “Optical frequency comb generation from a monolithic microresonator” has by now around 1000 citations (961 on Scopus, 1163 on Google Scholar). The review paper “Microresonator-based optical frequency combs” from 2011 (here are some comments on this review) has a similar amount of citations (890 on Scopus, 1026 on Google Scholar).
With a focus more on individual papers, here are my highlights from 2017.
Quite some potential applications for Kerr frequency combs have been demonstrated in 2017. Among them data communication (much improved over former demonstrations), distance measurements, spectroscopy and the use as a quantum source:
- Spencer, D. T. et al. An Integrated-Photonics Optical-Frequency Synthesizer. arXiv:1708.05228 [physics] (2017).
- Yu, M., Okawachi, Y., Griffith, A. G., Lipson, M. & Gaeta, A. L. Microresonator-based high-resolution gas spectroscopy. arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.04322 (2017).
- Marin-Palomo, P. et al. Microresonator-based solitons for massively parallel coherent optical communications. Nature 546, 274–279 (2017).
- Obrzud, E. et al. A Microphotonic Astrocomb. arXiv:1712.09526 [astro-ph, physics:physics] (2017).
- Jaramillo-Villegas, J. A. et al. Persistent energy-time entanglement covering multiple resonances of an on-chip biphoton frequency comb. Optica 4, 655 (2017).
- Kues, M. et al. On-chip generation of high-dimensional entangled quantum states and their coherent control. Nature 546, 622–626 (2017).
On the more fundamental side I thing the understanding of the interaction of solitons with each other or the lack of interaction but also the interaction with the material has really advanced in 2017. Some papers which cover this are:
- Suzuki, R., Kubota, A., Hori, A., Fujii, S. & Tanabe, T. Broadband gain induced Raman comb formation in a silica microresonator. arXiv:1712.05091 [physics] (2017).
- Okawachi, Y. et al. Competition between Raman and Kerr effects in microresonator comb generation. Optics Letters 42, 2786 (2017).
- Yang, Q.-F., Yi, X., Yang, K. Y. & Vahala, K. Counter-propagating solitons in microresonators. Nat Photon 11, 560 (2017).
- Cherenkov, A. V. et al. Raman-Kerr frequency combs in microresonators with normal dispersion. Opt. Express, OE 25, 31148–31158 (2017).
- Cole, D. C., Lamb, E. S., Del’Haye, P., Diddams, S. A. & Papp, S. B. Soliton crystals in Kerr resonators. Nature Photonics 11, 671 (2017).
- Wang, Y. et al. Universal mechanism for the binding of temporal cavity solitons. Optica, OPTICA 4, 855–863 (2017).
And even the conventional cw pumping and usual assumptions for the simulations have been successfully questioned:
- Obrzud, E., Lecomte, S. & Herr, T. Temporal solitons in microresonators driven by optical pulses. Nature Photonics 11, 600 (2017).
- Conforti, M. & Biancalana, F. Multi-resonant Lugiato–Lefever model. Opt. Lett., OL 42, 3666–3669 (2017).
With this I am looking forward to all the things that will be achieved in 2018.
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