Preliminary study of divertor particle exhaust in the EAST superconducting tokamak

The particle exhaust of the upper tungsten and lower carbon divertors in EAST has been preliminarily studied during the 2016 experimental campaign. The density decay time during terminating gas puffing has been employed as a key parameter to evaluate the divertor particle exhaust performance. Comparative plasma discharges have been carried out on the particle exhaust performance between two toroidal field directions in the upper single null and lower single null divertor configurations. This work has enhanced the understanding of the effects of the in–out asymmetry and divertor geometry on the efficiency of the divertor particle exhaust. In addition, the sensitivity of the particle exhaust capability on different strike point locations has been analyzed. The experimental results are expected to provide important information on the future upgrade of EAST bottom divertor and facilitate the realization of longer pulse operation.

Submilliwatt, widely tunable coherent microcomb generation with feedback-free operation

Microcombs are revolutionizing optoelectronics by providing parallel, mutually coherent wavelengthchannels for time-frequency metrology and information processing. To implement this essential function inintegrated photonic systems, it is desirable to drive microcombs directly with an on-chip laser in a simpleand flexible way. However, two major difficulties have prevented this goal: (1) generating mode-lockedcomb states usually requires a significant amount of pump power and (2) the requirement to align laser andresonator frequency significantly complicates operation and limits the tunability of the comb lines. Here, weaddress these problems by using microresonators on an AlGaAs on-insulator platform to generate dark-pulsemicrocombs. This highly nonlinear platform dramatically relaxes fabrication requirements and leads to arecord-low pump power of <1 mW for coherent comb generation. Dark-pulse microcombs facilitated bythermally controlled avoided mode crossings are accessed by direct distributed feedback laser pumping.Without any feedback or control circuitries, the comb shows good coherence and stability. With around150 mW on-chip power, this approach also leads to an unprecedentedly wide tuning range of over one freespectral range (97.5 GHz). Our work provides a route to realize power-efficient, simple, and reconfigurablemicrocombs that can be seamlessly integrated with a wide range of photonic systems.

Experimental optimization of an erbium-doped super-fluorescent fiber source for fiber optic gyroscopes

Double-pass forward and double-pass backward erbium-doped super-fluorescent fiber sources（EDSFSs） were combined in one configuration.A 980 nm laser diode pumped the same erbium-doped fiber from both directions using a coupler as a power splitter.The double-pass configuration was achieved by coating the fiber end face.Firstly,an optimal fiber length was found to obtain a high stability of output light wavelength with pump power, and then 1530/1550 nm wavelength division multiplexing was used for spectrum planarization,which expanded the bandwidth to more than 22 nm.The final step was a test of temperature stability.The results show that the rate of the central wavelength change kept to below 3.5 ppm/℃in the range of -40 to 60℃and 1-2 ppm/℃in the range of 20-30℃.Considering all the three factors of the fiber optic gyro applications,we selected 80 mA as the pump current,in which case the central wavelength temperature instability was calculated as 2.70 ppm/℃, 3 dB bandwidth 22.85 nm,spectral flatness 0.2 dB,output power 5.17 mW and power efficiency up to 9.92%.This experimental result has a significant reference value to the selection of devices and proper design of ED-SFSs for the application of high-precision fiber optic gyroscopes.