Jitter and stability analysis of an actively mode-locked dispersion-managed fiber laser

Abstract

The jitter and stability of an actively mode-locked (ML) dispersion-managed (DM) fiber ring laser are theoretically studied. A linearized analysis based on the variational approach is used to investigate the timing and energy jitter. We show that the timing jitter becomes smaller for stronger dispersion management. Too large dispersion management, however, may cause instability of the pulse energy. We further show that the magnitude of timing and energy jitter is significantly dependent on the location of the filter, amplifier, and modulator in the cavity. In the system operated with a narrow-band filter, low-amplitude pulses with long duration might coexist with the DM soliton pulse. We also examine the stability of DM soliton against the linear-mode growth in the ML DM fiber ring laser.