Deterministic generation of single soliton microcombs with enhanced stability using thermal self-starting and simplified temperature control

Soliton microcombs (SMCs) spontaneously emerge in coherently pumped high-quality (high-$Q$) microcavities and are widely used as on-chip optical frequency combs for precise measurements and spectroscopic applications. In this work, we present a thermal compensation scheme for generating single SMCs. Compared to other methods, the single SMC generated using our approach exhibits remarkable stability, with a lifetime exceeding 24 hours, and can be deterministically generated over a wide temperature range. Utilizing this feature, we successfully achieve thermal self-starting of single SMCs using a simple temperature control process. Over an experiment lasting more than 3 hours (with a cycle time of approximately 200 seconds between soliton generation, decay by design, and restart), the success rate of single SMC generation was 100%.