Observation of dispersive wave emission by temporal cavity solitons

We examine a coherently-driven, dispersion-managed, passive Kerr fiber ring resonator and report, to the best of our knowledge, the first direct experimental observation of dispersive wave emission by temporal cavity solitons (CSs). Our observations are in excellent agreement with analytical predictions and they are fully corroborated by numerical simulations. These results lead to a better understanding of the behavior of temporal CSs under conditions where higher-order dispersion plays a significant role. Significantly, since temporal CSs manifest themselves in monolithic microresonators, our results are likely to explain the origins of spectral features observed in broadband Kerr frequency combs. (C) 2014 Optical Society of America