Patent ID: 7982944

Claim:
A method of generating an optical frequency comb, comprising the steps of: generating input laser light with a laser device, said input laser light having a predetermined input light frequency, coupling the input laser light via a waveguide into a dielectric micro-resonator having a cavity exhibiting a third order nonlinearity, providing parametrically generated light in the micro-resonator by optical parametric generation, wherein the laser input light is coupled to a mode of the micro-resonator with a power level selected such that an optical field inside the cavity exceeds a predetermined cascaded parametric oscillation threshold at which the parametrically generated light includes frequencies of at least 10 frequency sidebands of the input light frequency and of the sidebands thereof, wherein signal and idler sidebands generated by the laser input light in the micro-resonator interact amongst each other by non-degenerate four-wave mixing and produce the frequency sidebands, and coupling the parametrically generated light out of the micro-resonator.