Abstract

During the last three years the potential of mode-locked rare-earth-doped fiber lasers for ultrashort pulse generation has been explored and both passive and active mode-locking schemes have been demonstrated. Systems which use nonlinear polarization evolution in conjunction with an intracavity polarizer to provide the passive mode-locking mechanism have so far been demonstrated in ring¹ (self-starting) and Fabry-Perot² (self-sustaining) configurations, the latter of which employed, an intracavity bulk polarizer and modulator. Following the work published by Davey et al.² we report a self-starting Fabry-Perot system capable of producing 1,6ps bandwidth-limited soliton pulses. We also show that the soliton pulsewidth in any of these configurations is ultimately limited by the dispersion-length product of the system, hence by careful choice of the fiber dispersion and fiber length the system should also he able to operate in the femtosecond regime³ The replacement of the two mirrors with fiber reflection gratings would make this configuration a truly all-fiber device.

© 1993 Optical Society of America