Second-harmonic-assisted four-wave mixing in chip-based microresonator frequency comb generation

Simultaneous Kerr comb formation and second-harmonic generation with on-chip microresonators can greatly facilitate comb self-referencing for optical clocks and frequency metrology. Moreover, the presence of both second- and third-order nonlinearities results in complex cavity dynamics that is of high scientific interest but is still far from being well-understood. Here, we demonstrate that the interaction between the fundamental and the second-harmonic waves can provide an entirely new way of phase matching for four-wave mixing in optical microresonators, enabling the generation of optical frequency combs in the normal dispersion regime under conditions where comb creation is ordinarily prohibited. We derive new coupled time-domain mean-field equations and obtain simulation results showing good qualitative agreement with our experimental observations. Our findings provide a novel way of overcoming the dispersion limit for simultaneous Kerr comb formation and second-harmonic generation, which might prove to be especially important in the near-visible to visible range where several atomic transitions commonly used for the stabilization of optical clocks are located and where the large normal material dispersion is likely to dominate.