Chaotic microcomb-based parallel ranging

The transition to chaos is ubiquitous in nonlinear systems ranging from fluid dynamics and superconducting circuits biological organisms. Optical driven out of equilibrium such as lasers supercontinuum generation exhibit chaotic states light with fluctuations both amplitude phase can give rise Levy statistics, turbulence rogue waves. Spatiotemporal also occurs continuous-wave-driven photonic-chip-based Kerr microresonators, where it referred modulation instability. Such instability have generally been considered impractical for applications, contrast their coherent-light-state counterparts, which include soliton or dark-pulse states. Here we demonstrate that incoherent an optical microresonator be harnessed implement unambiguous interference-immune massively parallel coherent laser by using the intrinsic random comb lines. We utilize 40 distinct lines a frequency operated regime. Each line carries >1 GHz noise bandwidth, greatly surpasses cavity linewidth, enables retrieve distance objects centimetre-scale resolution. Our approach utilizes one most widely accessible microcomb states, offers—in dissipative states—high conversion efficiency, well flat spectra, alleviates need complex initiation routines. Moreover generates wideband signal without requiring any electro-optical modulator microwave synthesizer. Viewed more broadly, similar capable could applied random-modulation spread-spectrum communication, cryptography number generation. regime are used realize continuous-wave detection ranging,