Temporal characterization of a multi-wavelength Brillouin–erbium fiber laser

Victor Lambin Iezzi,Benjamin J Eggleton,Amirhossein Tehranchi,Raman Kashyap,Thomas F S Büttner,Irina V Kabakova,Sébastien Loranger

doi:10.1088/1367-2630/18/5/055003

Abstract

This paper provides the first detailed temporal characterization of a multi-wavelength-Brillouin–erbium fiber laser (MWBEFL) by measuring the optical intensity of the individual frequency channels with high temporal resolution. It is found that the power in each channel is highly unstable due to the excitation of several cavity modes for typical conditions of operation. Also provided is the real-time measurements of the MWBEFL output power for two configurations that were previously reported to emit phase-locked picosecond pulse trains, concluded from their autocorrelation measurements. Real-time measurements reveal a high degree of instability without the formation of a stable pulse train. Finally, we model the MWBEFL using coupled wave equations describing the evolution of the Brillouin pump, Stokes and acoustic waves in the presence of stimulated Brillouin scattering, and the optical Kerr effect. A good qualitative consistency between the simulation and experimental results is evident, in which the interference signal at the output shows strong instability as well as the chaotic behavior due to the dynamics of participating pump and Stokes waves.

Highlights

Multi-wavelength sources with a constant channel spacing that is in the order of tens of gigahertz are useful for many applications such as metrology [1], spectroscopy [2], arbitrary waveform generation [3], microwave synthesizers [4], wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) [5, 6] and high-speed optical clocks [7] for optical communications
Individual line characterization In order to determine the usefulness of the described MWBEFL configurations as stable multi-wavelength sources, we first characterize the temporal performance of individual frequency channels, corresponding to the different orders of Stokes waves
To get a deeper insight on the evolution of Stokes lines using the cascaded SBS (cSBS) in the resonator and to explain the experimental results, we propose a model to numerically simulate the pump and Stokes waves dynamics in a dual-cavity MWBEFL

Summary

Introduction

Multi-wavelength sources with a constant channel spacing that is in the order of tens of gigahertz are useful for many applications such as metrology [1], spectroscopy [2], arbitrary waveform generation [3], microwave synthesizers [4], wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) [5, 6] and high-speed optical clocks [7] for optical communications. Among other techniques [8,9,10], Brillouin-based lasers have gained considerable attention due to their advantages such as their simplicity, robustness, and only need for standard components. It can be used to generate new optical frequency components that are shifted by ∼10 GHz without the need for high speed electronics. Others have used forward SBS in microstructured fibers [20]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion