Intrinsic amplitude-noise suppression in fiber lasers mode-locked with nonlinear amplifying loop mirrors

Intensity noise of mode-locked fiber lasers.

Intensity noise of mode-locked fiber lasers is characterized systematically for all major mode-locking regimes over a wide range of parameters. We find that equally low-noise performance can be obtained in all regimes. Losses in the cavity influence noise strongly without a clear trace in the pulse characteristics. Given that high-energy fiber laser oscillators reported to date have utilized la...

Mode Locked Fiber Lasers

Mode-locked ytterbium fiber lasers.

A compact fiber laser is demonstrated with use of a Gires-Tournois compensator and a short length (2-4 cm-long) of highly doped ytterbium (Yb) fiber providing net anomalous group-velocity dispersion. With use of a novel semiconductor saturable absorber mirror based on GaInNAs structure, self-started 1.5-ps-pulse mode-locked operation was obtained at 1023 nm with a repetition rate of 95 MHz. A m...

Picosecond soliton transmission by use of concatenated gain-distributed nonlinear amplifying fiber loop mirrors.

Stable picosecond soliton transmission is demonstrated numerically by use of concatenated gain-distributed nonlinear amplifying fiber loop mirrors (NALMs). We show that, as compared with previous soliton transmission schemes that use conventional NALMs or nonlinear optical loop mirror and amplifier combinations, the present scheme permits a significant increase of loop-mirror (amplifier) spacin...

Low-noise picosecond soliton transmission by use of concatenated nonlinear amplifying loop mirrors

We compare two systems that are specially configured with loop mirrors to provide stable picosecond soliton transmission. One configuration, created by Smith and Doran [J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 12, 1117 (1995)], uses nonlinear optical loop mirrors. This configuration is compared with another that uses nonlinear amplifying loop mirrors, the configuration of which we systematically determine from the a...