Effect of feedback elements on the phase locking properties of fiber lasers via mutual injection coupling

Abstract

Coherent combining of several multi-wavelength fiber lasers is a promising approach to suppress the nonlinear effects and improve the output power. Passive phase locking of two multi-wavelength fiber lasers has been demonstrated by using mutual injection coupling and spatial filtering technique, and the effect of feedback elements on the phase locking properties has been investigated in detail. Three different kinds of feedback elements, fiber Bragg grating (FBG), fiber loop mirror (FLM) and fiber reflection mirror (FRM) are employed as the component laser’s high reflection mirror to construct the phase locking array respectively. Compared with the traditional feedback element FBG, the FLM is made of a 3dB fiber coupler and provide high reflection feedback in a wide spectral range for fiber laser, and the FRM is also a wide-band reflector with the fiber end coated by multilayer dielectric film. When the FLM and FRM are employed as the component laser’s feedback elements, a large number of longitudinal modes operate simultaneously and the spectra vary continuously. Fortunately, stable phase locking has been obtained as long as the single-mode filtering fiber is introduced into the feedback loop, and obvious interference patterns with high fringe visibility have been observed in far field. The phased array’s output power can also keep stable at the same time, and its amount is higher than the case of using FBG. In conclusion, the research results indicate that efficient phase locking of several multi-wavelength fiber lasers can also be achieved by passive self-adjusting method and higher output power can be obtained compared with the usual coherent combining of narrow-band laser beams, as long as necessary optical coupling is introduced among component lasers and proper spatial filtering measures are adopted.