Our paper Reversible Self-Replication of Spatio-Temporal Kerr Cavity Patterns has been recently accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters (PRL), with IF = 8.385, jointly with Salim B. Ivars, Yaroslav V. Kartashov, Lluis Torner, and Carles Milián. In this work, we uncover a novel and robust phenomenon that causes the gradual self-replication of spatiotemporal Kerr cavity patterns in cylindrical microresonators. These patterns are inherently synchronized multi-frequency combs. Under proper conditions, the axially-localized nature of the patterns leads to a fundamental drift instability that induces transitions amongst patterns with a different number of rows. Self-replications, thus, result in the stepwise addition or removal of individual combs along the cylinder’s axis. Transitions occur in a fully reversible and, consequently, deterministic way. The phenomenon puts forward a novel paradigm for Kerr frequency comb formation and reveals important insights into the physics of multi-dimensional nonlinear patterns.
