Temporal cavity solitons in one-dimensional Kerr media as bits in an all-optical buffer

Temporal cavity solitons are packets of light persisting in a continuously driven nonlinear resonator. They are robust attracting states, readily excited through a phase-insensitive and wavelength-insensitive process. As such, they constitute an ideal support for bits in an optical buffer that would seamlessly combine three critical telecommunication functions, namely all-optical storage, all-optical reshaping and wavelength conversion. Here, with standard silica optical fibres, we report the first experimental observation of temporal cavity solitons. The cavity solitons are 4 ps long and are used to demonstrate storage of a data stream for more than a second. We also observe interactions of close cavity solitons, revealing for our set-up a potential capacity of up to 45,000 bits at 25 Gbit s(-1). More fundamentally, cavity solitons are localized dissipative structures. Therefore, given that silica exhibits a pure instantaneous Kerr nonlinearity, our experiment constitutes one of the simplest examples of self-organization phenomena in nonlinear optics.