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Optica Publishing Group
  • 2015 European Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics - European Quantum Electronics Conference
  • (Optica Publishing Group, 2015),
  • paper CF_P_11

Optical Frequency Characteristics of a 10GHz Asynchronous Harmonic Mode-Locked Fiber Soliton Laser

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Abstract

Asynchronous mode-locked (ASM) fiber lasers exhibit some unique lasing dynamics including the slow periodic oscillation of the optical central wavelength and the pulse timing position, which have been verified both theoretically and experimentally [1,2]. Since the oscillation magnitude of the optical central wavelength can be in the order of 1 nm, it is interesting to further examine the characteristics of individual optical frequency components from the laser to see if they are also slowly oscillating. As shown in Fig. 1(a), we use a narrowband tunable optical filter to filter out one or two of the optical frequency components from a 10 GHz asynchronous mode-locked Er-doped fiber soliton laser reported in our previous works [1]. The selected frequency component is beating with the light from a wavelength-stabilized narrow-band semiconductor light source around the same optical frequency for optical frequency detection. The typical RF beating spectrum is shown in the inset of Fig. 1(b). The 3dB linewidth of the beating signal is around MHz, which should be limited by the linewidth of the reference semiconductor light source. The successful observation of the RF beating signal confirms for the first time that the individual optical frequency components of the ASM fiber laser do not oscillate along with the central optical wavelength in the order of 1 nm. Furthermore, we have found that the observed beating frequency will drift randomly within a frequency range. To investigate the causes of such beating frequency variation and the possible ways to reduce it, we deliberately change the lasing spectral width to observe the possible dependence. The corresponding beating frequency variation range is plotted in Fig. 1(b). One can see that the optical frequency variation decreases from 5 GHz to 700 MHz as the FWHM lasing width increases from 4.167 nm to 5nm. The results suggest that observed beating frequency variation may be due to the random drift of the laser operation caused by the noises and environmental perturbations. When the lasing spectral width is larger, the band-pass optical filter in the cavity can exhibit more band-pass optical filtering effects to limit the optical frequency drifting and thus the observed frequency variation is reduced. We have also investigated the possibility of using optical injection [3] for reducing the optical frequency variation. By injecting 10 μW of the CW laser light from the wavelength stabilized light source into the mode-locked fiber laser cavity, the optical frequency drift can be suppressed to be around 1 GHz in comparison with 5 GHz without the optical injection. These preliminary results indicate that optical injection also has some effects on suppressing the optical frequency variation of the mode-locked laser. By more optimizing the laser parameters, we expect the optical frequency variation of the studied asynchronous mode-locked fiber soliton laser can be further reduced with the combined approaches of band-pass optical filtering and optical injection. The obtained results should be helpful for further building optical frequency stable asynchronous mode-locked fiber lasers.

© 2015 IEEE

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