Modulational instability of coupled ring waveguides with linear gain and nonlinear loss

Cavity solitons in a microring dimer with gain and loss

We address a pair of vertically coupled microring resonators with gain and loss pumped by a single-frequency field. Coupling between microrings results in a twofold splitting of the single microring resonance that increases when gain and losses decrease, giving rise to two cavity soliton (CS) families. We show that the existence regions of CSs are tunable and that both CS families can be stable in the presence of an imbalance between gain and losses in the two microrings. These findings enable experimental realization of frequency combs in configurations with active microrings and contribute toward the realization of compact multisoliton comb sources.