Amplification and Compression of Ultrashort Fundamental Solitons in An Erbium-Doped Nonlinear Amplifying Fiber Loop Mirror

A nonlinear amplifying loop mirror constructed from erbium-doped fiber is proposed for simultaneous amplification and compression of ultrashort fundamental solitons. Numerical simulations show that, the proposed device performs efficient high-quality amplification and compression of solitons.

Suppression of multi-pulse formation in all-polarization-maintaining figure-9 erbium-doped fiber mode-locked laser

We report on a novel architecture to suppress the multi-pulse formation in an all-polarization-maintaining figure-9 erbium-doped fiber laser under high pump power. A 2×2 fiber coupler is introduced into the phase-biased nonlinear amplifying loop mirror to extract part of intracavity laser power as a laser output, and the dependence of output couple ratio of fiber coupler on the mode-locking state is experimentally investigated. The intracavity nonlinear effect is mitigated by lowering the intracavity laser power, which is conducive to avoiding the multi-pulse formation. In the meantime, the loss-imbalance induced by fiber coupler is helpful in improving the self-starting ability. With the proposed laser structure,the multiple pulse formation can be suppressed and high power single pulse train can be obtained. The laser emits three pulse trains which is convenient for some applications. Finally, the output power values of three ports are 5.3 m W, 51.3 m W,and 13.2 m W, respectively. The total single pulse output power is 69.8 m W, which is more than 10 times the result without OC2. The total slope efficiency is about 10.1%. The repetition rate of three pulse trains is 21.17 MHz, and the pulse widths are 2.8 ps, 2.63 ps, and 6.66 ps, respectively.

All polarization-maintaining Er:fiber-based optical frequency comb for frequency comparison of optical clocks

We demonstrate an optical frequency comb(OFC)based on a turnkey mode-locked laser with a figure-9-shape structure and polarization-maintaining fibers,for the comparison of frequency among optical clocks with wavelengths of 698 nm,729 nm,1068 nm,and 1156 nm.We adopt a multi-branch approach in order to produce high power OFC signals at these specific wavelengths,enabling the signal-to-noise ratio of the beatnotes between the OFC and the clock lasers to exceed30 d B at a resolution bandwidth of 300 k Hz.This approach makes the supercontinuum spectra much easier to be generated than a single branch OFC.However,more out-of-loop fibers degrade the long-term frequency instability due to thermal drift.To minimize the thermal drift effect,we set the fiber lengths of different branches to be similar,and we stabilize the temperature as well.The out-of-loop frequency instability of the OFC due to the incoherence of the multi-branch is about5.5×10^(19) for 4000 s,while the in-loop frequency instability of fceo and that of fbeat are 7.5×10^(18) for 1 s and 8.5×10^(18) for 1 s,respectively.The turnkey OFC meets the requirement for the comparison of frequency between the best optical clocks.

Isolator-free unidirectional thulium-doped fiber laser

We report the first demonstration of a unidirectional,isolator-free 2-μm thulium-doped fiber(TDF)laser,relying on the properties of the theta cavity(ring resonator with S-shaped feedback).The core pumped theta cavity TDF laser provides sub-Watt output power with a slope efficiency of 25%,a 2 dB flat tuning range of 1900–2050 nm,and a linewidth of 0.2 nm,and achieves the extinction ratio of 18–25 dB(depending on the feedback value)between the favored and suppressed lasing directions.It is shown that these characteristics are competitive with,if not superior to,those of conventional ring cavities.The simulation results of the linear and Kerr-nonlinear theta cavities are also presented,explaining certain unexpected features of the laser behavior and establishing the importance of the doped fiber nonlinearity on the spectral shaping of the emitted signal.