Perfect soliton crystals in Kerr optical cavities with pure-quartic dispersion

We report a theoretical and numerical study of soliton crystal formation in Kerr optical cavities with negative pure-quartic dispersion. Numerically solving a normalized quartic Lugiato–Lefever equation shows that perfect soliton crystals emerge spontaneously over a wide parameter range, even after the system undergoes spatio-temporal chaos. For large cavity detunings, strain causes the soliton crystal to break. They then follow the same behavior as unconstrained quartic soliton molecules. All perfect quartic soliton crystals break at a critical strain of approximately 12%, independent of the number of solitons in the crystal.