Abstract
Recently there has been great interest in pulse sources with high repetition rates to satisfy the large demand for information capacity and to develop fast logic devices in optical communication systems. Electronics-based and direct modulation technologies have been widely investigated but are generally limited to repetition rates of around 40 GHz, although some exceptions have been demonstrated. Passive optical modulation techniques have, however, proven successful in obtaining repetition rates of up to a few terahertz. For example, rational mode-locking of fiber lasers, split semi-conductor laser cavities and various laser beating techniques have all demon strated high-quality ultra-short pulse trains. Another powerful passive technique, modulational instability (MI), can be used to obtain high-quality pulses with repetition rates in excess of 100 GHz in optical fiber devices. MI refers to the transition from continuous-wave (CW) light to short pulses when amplitude fluctuations on the CW light level are amplified and compressed due to the interplay between self-phase modulation (SPM) and anomalous dispersion in an optical fiber. Pulses from MI have been generated in both single-pass1 and ring cavity laser2 configurations, with the latter demonstrating lower CW backgrounds. Furthermore, more efficient self-induced ring cavity configurations have been presented which use an intracavity erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) as a complementary gain mechanism.3
© 2002 Optical Society of America
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