Abstract

The development of high bit rate laser sources has attracted much interest in view of its application in fiber transmission systems One of the most interesting devices are the harmonically mode-locked fiber lasers (HML-EDFL), because of their intrinsic property of generating hyperbolic secant or gaussian pulse trains, suitable for soliton transmission systems. The most important characteristics of this source are wide tunability (more than 50 nm in the 1550 spectral region [1]), repetition rate up to 40 GHz [1] and pulse duration down to a few picosecond. In view of the application of this source in a commercial transmission link, few problems require to be solved: the control of the state of polarization of the light circulating inside the cavity, the stabilization of the modulation frequency, and the cavity pulse filling.

© 1996 IEEE