Phase Symmetry Breaking for All-Optical Computing with Microresonators

Current fiber optic technology suffers from scalability limitations, preventing its use in real-time data processing in optical communications systems and photonic networks. Major challenges are optical to electronic (and vice-versa) signal conversions, which introduce additional complexity. Upcoming all-optical circuits [1] can resolve this issue by reducing the latency related to such conversions, however, they require comparably high optical power to operate. Kerr-microresonators provide an interesting platform for developing all-optical circuits using nonlinear effects at much lower threshold power.