Taming the instabilities inherent to many nonlinear optical phenomena is of paramount importance for modern photonics. In particular, the so-called snake instability is universally known to severely distort localized wave stripes, leading to the occurrence of transient, short-lived dynamical states that eventually decay. This phenomenon is ubiquitous in nonlinear science—from river meandering to superfluids—and so far it apparently remains uncontrollable; however, here we show that optical snake instabilities can be harnessed by a process that leads to the formation of stationary and robust two-dimensional zigzag states. We find that such a new type of nonlinear waves exists in the hyperbolic regime of cylindrical microresonators, and that it naturally corresponds to two-dimensional frequency combs featuring spectral heterogeneity and intrinsic synchronization. We uncover the conditions of the existence of such spatiotemporal photonic snakes and confirm their remarkable robustness against perturbations. Our findings represent a new paradigm for frequency comb generation, thus opening the door to a whole range of applications in communications, metrology and spectroscopy.

克服许多非线性光学现象固有的不稳定性对于现代光子学至关重要。特别是，众所周知，所谓的蛇形不稳定性会严重扭曲局部波条纹，导致瞬态、短暂的动态状态的出现，最终会衰减。这种现象在非线性科学中无处不在——从河流蜿蜒到超流体——到目前为止，它显然仍然无法控制；然而，在这里我们表明，光学蛇形不稳定性可以通过导致形成静止和稳健的二维之字形状态的过程来利用。我们发现这种新型非线性波存在于圆柱形微谐振器的双曲线区域中，并且它自然对应于具有光谱异质性和固有同步性的二维频率梳。我们揭示了这种时空光子蛇存在的条件，并证实了它们对扰动的显着鲁棒性。我们的发现代表了频率梳生成的新范例，从而为通信、计量学和光谱学的一系列应用打开了大门。