Generating optical pulses via a soliton state of an optical microresonator coupled with a chip based semiconductor laser

A light pulse source (100), being adapted for generating repetitive optical pulses (1), comprises a continuous wave cw laser device (10) being arranged for providing cw laser light (2), an optical waveguide (20) being optically coupled with the cw laser device (10),an optical microresonator (30) being made of a resonator material, which has a third order Kerr nonlinearity and an anomalous resonator dispersion, wherein the cw laser device (10) and the optical microresonator (30) are arranged on a common chip substrate device (40) for coupling the cw laser light (2) via the optical waveguide (20) into the optical microresonator (30), which, at a predetermined output frequency of the cw laser device (10), is capable of including a light field in a soliton state, so that soliton shaped pulses can be coupled out of the optical microresonator (30) for providing the repetitive optical pulses (1), and a tuning device (50) being arranged for adjusting the output frequency of the cw laser device (10), wherein the cw laser device (10) comprises a chip based semiconductor laser (11), at least one of the optical microresonator (30) and the optical waveguide (20) is adapted for reflecting an optical feedback portion (3) of light back to the semiconductor laser (11), which is capable of providing self injection locking relative to a resonance frequency of the optical microresonator (30) by the effect of the optical feedback portion (3), and the tuning device (50) is arranged for tuning at least one of a driving current and a temperature of the semiconductor laser (11) such that the optical microresonator (30) is capable of providing the soliton state. Furthermore, a light pulse generation method is described.