Deep-Learning-Enabled State Classification in Thermally Stabilized Soliton Microcombs
Abstract
Dissipative Kerr soliton (DKS) microcombs generated in microresonators feature octave-spanning bandwidths and gigahertz-to-terahertz repetition rates, underpinning applications from coherent communications to precision metrology. Reliable deployment, however, requires not only thermally robust soliton generation in chip-scale resonators but also real-time, noise-tolerant recognition of distinct soliton states beyond the limitations of heuristic methods and conventional Fourier analysis. Here, we present a hybrid deep-learning framework that integrates convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Transformer-based multihead attention (TMHA), enabling precise and automated classification of measured soliton spectra. Stable DKS generation with 250 nm optical bandwidth is demonstrated in high- Q silicon nitride (Si 3 N 4 ) microring resonators (MRRs), aided by phase-modulated sideband stabilization to suppress thermal instabilities. Single-soliton, multi-soliton, and perfect soliton crystal (PSC) states are consistently produced and quantitatively characterized via an improved fast Fourier transform–genetic algorithm (FFT-GA) routine. The hybrid CNN-TMHA model achieves a classification accuracy of 98.70%, with the shortest average inference time (6.51 ms) and highest throughput (153.58 samples/s) among all evaluated models. The combination of thermally stabilized soliton generation and high-performance state recognition enables field-ready, on-device recognition that supports closed-loop control, thereby moving microcombs from laboratory demonstrations to deployable microcomb-enabled photonic systems.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Advanced Fiber Laser Technologies
Photonic and Optical Devices
Mechanical and Optical Resonators
Publication details
- Journal / source
- ACS Photonics
- Publisher
- American Chemical Society (ACS)
- Volume
- 13
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 510–523
- Publication date
- 2 January 2026
- Language
- EN