Abstract

Stable picosecond optical pulse sources working at multigiga hertz repetition rates are highly desirable for applications in soliton communication systems. Mode-locked erbium fibre lasers can produce highly transform limited pulses, but unless synchronisation to specific data rates can be demonstrated, they are of little use in communications experiments. Different schemes to stabilize them have been proposed and realized [1,2,3,6]. One is to stabilise the cavity length and at the same time dither it at a kilohertz rate [1,6]. Another is to insert into the fibre cavity a high finesse etalon whose FSR is equal to the pulse repetition frequency to suppress unwanted supermodes in a harmonically mode-locked ring laser [2]. Yet another scheme is to use a polarisation maintaining ring cavity to avoid detrimental polarisation fluctuations [3]. Fibre lasers stabilised by these methods have been sucsessfully used in soliton transmission experiments [4,5,6]. In this paper, we report a 1 OGHz mode-locked erbium fibre laser, made of all commercial components, stabilized without use of an etalon and PM fibres, and its application in a 4x10Gbit/s soliton transmission experiment.

© 1993 Optical Society of America