Self-referenced frequency comb from a polarization-maintaining Er: Fiber laser based nonlinear polarization evolution

Abstract

To the best of our knowledge, this paper presents the first self-referenced polarization-maintaining (PM) Er: nonlinear polarization evolution-based fiber frequency comb. A short PM fiber section segment acts as an artificial saturable absorber and compensates for the group velocity mismatch. A conventional f-2f interferometer allows detecting carrier-envelope offsetting frequency (fceo) after an octave-spanning spectrum generation. A complete description of the PM Er: fiber comb combining a noise study of the repetition rate (fr) and fceo is presented. Accordingly, the in-loop residual phase noise of fceo and fr are 468 mrad and 0.336 mrad from 1 Hz to 3 MHz, respectively. Further, we verify the long-term performance of the comb system by recording the fluctuation of fr and fceo for more than 10 h. We observed that combining fast actuators for phase noise suppression would potentially enable a compact and robust frequency comb system for a range of applications such as comb-based liars, optical clock, and gas sensing.