Experimental investigation of high energy noise-like pulses from a long cavity erbium-doped fiber laser

Abstract

The high energy noise-like pulses (NLPs) were experimentally investigated in a passively mode-locked erbium-doped fiber laser with a long ring cavity by using nonlinear polarization rotation technique. Large net normal group-velocity dispersion of the cavity is estimated as high as 6.46 ps2, which is beneficial to formation of high-energy pulses. With the total pump power of 970 mW (the pump powers of forward pump and backward pump are set at the value of 455 mW and 515 mW, respectively), a stable ultrahigh energy rectangular-shape pulse emission with the pulse duration of 35 ns was observed. The energy of square packet with a fundamental repetition rate of 141.6 kHz is as high as 840 nJ. The signal-to-noise is higher than 60 dB in RF spectrum. The feature of NLPs is confirmed by the coherent spike of autocorrelation trace. When the pump power is beyond 970 mW, the mode locking operation with fundamental repetition rate cannot be achieved despite of the large range variation of polarization controller (PC) settings. However, the forthorder harmonic mode locking can be observed, the square pulse packet duration still remains at ∼ 35 ns. The experimental results demonstrated that the ultrahigh energy NLPs is only realized at the condition of special physical parameters and it is restricted by the number and intensity of ultra short pulses within the envelope to some extent.