  Dissipative Kerr solitons have recently been generated in optical
microresonators, enabling ultrashort optical pulses at microwave repetition
rates, that constitute coherent and numerically predictable Kerr frequency
combs. However, the seeding and excitation of the temporal solitons is
associated with changes in the intracavity power, that can lead to large
thermal resonance shifts during the excitation process and render the soliton
states in most commonly used resonator platforms short lived. Here we describe
a "power kicking" method to overcome this instability by modulating the power
of the pump laser. A fast modulation triggers the soliton formation, while a
slow adjustment of the power compensates the thermal effect during the
excitation laser scan. With this method also initially very short-lived (100ns)
soliton states , as encountered in SiN integrated photonic microresonators, can
be brought into a steady state in contrast to techniques reported earlier which
relied on an adjustment of the laser scan speed only. Once the soliton state is
in a steady state it can persist for hours and is thermally self-locked.
