Adiabatic and deterministic routes to soliton combs in non-Hermitian Kerr cavities

We present a cardinal solution for the long-standing and fundamental problem associated with the adiabatic, reversible, and controlled excitation of both dark and bright solitons in Kerr microresonators with normal group-velocity dispersion. Our findings stem from the inclusion of a localized non-Hermitian potential, which we use to drastically reshape the characteristic collapsed snaking structure associated with such solitons. Consequently, we demonstrate a snaking-free bifurcation landscape where solitons of all possible widths are continuously connected via the dynamic change of the cavity detuning, and hence dissipative localized states of unprecedentedly high pump-to-comb conversion efficiencies can be excited in an adiabatic, deterministic, and reversible fashion. Our fundamental discovery has practical implications of paramount importance for frequency comb generation in all-normal dispersion cavities, which are key to comb generation in most spectral regions away from the telecom bands.