Abstract

The Nonlinear interaction between counterpropagating light has attracted significant attention in the context of unidirectional lasing in ring resonators and in nonlinear loop mirrors. In this work we demonstrate that Kerr-nonlinearity-mediated interaction between counterpropagating light in a passive ultra-high-Q microresonator can produce spontaneous symmetry breaking. When sending light of the same frequency, polarisation, and power in counterpropagating directions into a microresonator we observe a resonance frequency splitting such that light will only couple into the resonator in one (randomly chosen) direction.

© 2017 IEEE