Stabilization of an active harmonic modelocked Er-fiber laser using a reflective fiber grating resonator

Abstract

Summary form only given. In recent years there have been great advances on the fabrication techniques of fiber gratings and fiber lasers. The combination of the two technologies has enabled the emergence of new types of fiber lasers. We report the performance of an active harmonic modelocked. Er-fiber laser stabilized by a reflective fiber grating Fabry-Perot resonator. As is well known, typical harmonic modelocked fiber lasers are not be stable if no additional stabilization scheme is used. This is because there are many supermodes which compete with each other for maximum gain and thus make the laser unstable. In the literature several methods have been developed to stabilize a harmonic modelocked fiber laser. Among these methods, using an intracavity Fabry-Perot resonant filter which has a longitudinal mode separation that matches the Nth harmonic repetition frequency of the cavity is the most direct and efficient method since it forces the laser to lase at a single supermode. We adopt this approach and use a reflective fiber grating Fabry-Perot resonator as the stabilization filter. Compared to the reported works in the literature where a bulk transmission Fabry-Perot resonator is used, our approach has the advantages of being all fiber-integrated and being able to simultaneously achieve wavelength selection, laser stabilization, and dispersion compensation without requiring additional optical components in the cavity. These advantages should be valuable if a compact and stable harmonic modelocked fiber laser is to be built.