Temporal Solitons in Active Cavities under Extreme Power Extraction

Temporal solitons in coherently driven optical cavities have drawn considerable interest for their remarkable stability and promising applications such as in optical communications and spectroscopy [1]. These solitons arise in high-finesse cavities through a delicate balance between dispersion and Kerr nonlinearity, as well as gain and loss. In passive cavities, the coherent driving field provides the gain. Thus, in practice, only a small fraction of the soliton power can be extracted. Active cavity solitons (ACSs) [2], [3] overcome this limitation by integrating an intracavity amplifier to partially compensate for losses while keeping the cavity below lasing threshold. In this work, we leverage the active cavity scheme to theoretically and experimentally demonstrate the formation of stable ACSs with output coupling up to 90% under low power continuous-wave (CW) driving.