2000 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.

IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technology
Volume 18 Number 11, November 2000

Table of Contents for this issue

Complete paper in PDF format

Theoretical and Experimental Study of Harmonically Modelocked Fiber Lasers for Optical Communication Systems

Moshe Horowitz, Curtis R. Menyuk, Thomas F. Carruthers and Irl N. DulingIII

Page 1565.

Abstract:

We study theoretically and experimentally actively modelocked fiber lasers that are used in high repetition rate optical communication systems. Using an innovative numerical technique and a reduced model, we have found that the laser can operate in four different operating regimes when the laser intensity was changed; three of the regimes were experimentally observed in a laser with a sigma configuration. An excellent quantitative agreement between the theoretical and the experimental results was obtained. The use of dispersion management in the sigma laser was found to significantly improve the laser performance.

References

  1. T. F. Carruthers and I. N. Duling III, "10-GHz, 1.3-ps erbium fiber laser employing soliton pulse shortening", Opt. Lett., vol. 23, pp.  1927-1929, 1996.
  2. M. L. Dennis, T. F. Carruthers, W. I. Kaechele, R. B. Jenkins, J. U. Kang and I. N. Duling III, "Long span repeaterless transmission using adiabatic solitons", IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett., vol. 11, pp.  478-480, 1999.
  3. M. L. Dennis, W. I. Kaechele, L. Goldberg, T. F. Carruthers and I. N. Duling III, "Wavelength-division-multiplexed 4× 10 Gb/s adiabatic soliton transmission over 235 km", IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett., vol. 11, pp.  1680 -1682, 1999.
  4. G. M. Carter, R.-M. Mu, V. S. Grigoryan, C. R. Menyuk, P. Sinha, T. F. Carruthers, M. L. Dennis and I. N. Duling III, "Transmission of dispersion-managed solitons at 20 Gbit/s over 20 000km", Electron. Lett., vol. 35, pp.  233-234,  1999.
  5. T. R. Clark, T. F. Carruthers, P. J. Matthews and I. N. Duling III, "Phase noise measurements of ultrafast 10 GHz harmonically modelocked fiber laser", Electron. Lett., vol. 35, pp.  720-721, 1999.
  6. H. A. Haus and A. Mecozzi, "Long-term storage of a bit stream of solitons", Opt. Lett., vol. 17, pp.  1500-1502, 1992.
  7. F. X. Kärtner, D. Kopf and U. Keller, "Solitary-pulse stabilization and shortening in actively mode-locked lasers", J. Opt. Soc. Amer. B, vol. 12, pp.  486-496, 1995.
  8. H. A. Haus, "A theory of forced mode locking", IEEE J. Quantum Electron., vol. 11, pp.  323-330, 1975.
  9. D. E. Martinez, R. L. Fork and J. P. Gordon, "Theory of passively mode-locked lasers for the case of a nonlinear complex-propagation coefficient", J. Opt. Soc. Amer. B, vol. 2, pp.  753-760, 1985.
  10. N. Nakazawa, K. Tamura and E. Yoshida, "Supermode noise suppression in a harmonically modelocked fiber laser by selfphase modulation and spectral filtering", Electron. Lett., vol. 32, pp.  461-463, 1996.
  11. G. T. Harvey and L. F. Mollenauer, "Harmonically mode-locked fiber ring laser with an internal Fabry-Perot stabilizer for soliton transmission", Opt. Lett., vol. 18, pp.  108-110, 1993.
  12. M. Horowitz, C. R. Menyuk and S. Keren, "Modeling the saturation induced by broadband pulses amplified in an erbium-doped fiber amplifier", J. Lightwave Technol., vol. 11, pp.  1235-1237, 1999.
  13. G. P. Agrawal, "Amplification of ultrashort solitons in erbium-doped fiber amplifiers", IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett., vol. 2, pp.  875-877,  1990.
  14. H. A. Haus and A. Mecozzi, "Noise of mode-locked lasers", IEEE J. Quantum Electron., vol. 29, pp.  983-996, 1993.
  15. E. Desurvire, J. L. Zyskind and J. R. Simpson, "Spectral gain hole-burning at 1.53 µ m in erbium-doped fiber amplifiers", IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett., vol. 2, pp.  246-248, 1990.
  16. I. N. Duling and R. D. Esman, "Single-polarization fiber amplifier", Electron. Lett., vol. 28, pp.  1126-1128, 1992.
  17. D Marcuse, P. K. A Wai and C. R. Menyuk, "Application of the Manakov-PMD equation to studies of signal propagation in optical fibers with randomly varying birefringence", J. Lightwave Technol., vol. 15, pp.  1735-1746, 1997.
  18. G. P. Agrawal, Nonlinear Fiber Optics, San Diego: Academic, 1995, ch. 1.
  19. E. Desurvire, "Study of the complex atomic susceptibility of erbium-doped fiber amplifiers", J. Lightwave Technol., vol. 8, pp.  1517-1527, 1990.
  20. A. Yariv, Optical Electronics, New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1985, pp.  123-135. 
  21. G. P. Agrawal, Optical Communication Systems, New York: Wiley-Interscience, 1997, ch. 1.
  22. M. Horowitz and C. R. Menyuk, "Analysis of pulse dropout in harmonically modelocked fiber lasers using Lyapunov's method", Opt. Lett., vol.  25, pp.  40-42, 2000.
  23. V. S. Grigoryan, C. R. Menyuk and R.-M. Mu, "Calculation of timing jitter and amplitude jitter in dispersion-managed optical fiber communications using linearization", J. Lightwave Technol., vol. 17, pp.  1347-1356, 1999.
  24. D. von der Linde, "Characterization of the noise in continuously operating mode-locked lasers", Appl. Phys. B, vol. 39, pp.  201-217,  1986.
  25. T. F. Carruthers, I. N. Duling III, M. Horowitz and C. R. Menyuk, "Dispersion management in a harmonically mode-locked fiber soliton laser", Opt. Lett. , vol. 25, pp.  153-155, 2000.
  26. D. J. Kuizenga and A. Siegman, "FM and AM mode locking of the homogeneous laser-part I: Theory", IEEE J. Quantum Electron., vol. 6, pp.  694-706,  1970.
  27. J.-J. E. Slotine and W. Li, Applied Nonlinear Control, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1991, pp.  53-57. 
  28. N. Minorsky, Nonlinear Oscillation, New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1987.
  29. M. F. Nakazawa, E. Yamada, H. Kubota and K. Suzuki, "10 Gbit/s soliton data transmission over one million kilometers", Electron. Lett., vol. 27, pp.  1270-1272, 1991.
  30. N. J. Smith, N. J. Doran, W. Forysiak and F. M. Knox, "Soliton transmission using periodic dispersion compensation", J. Lightwave Technol., vol. 10, pp.  1808-1822, 1997.
  31. V. S. Grigoryan, T. Yu, E. A. Golovchenko, C. R. Menyuk and A. N. Pilipetskii, "Dispersion-managed soliton dynamics", Opt. Lett., vol. 22, pp.  1609-1611, 1997.
  32. A. B. Grudinin, D. J. Richardson and D. N. Payne, "Energy quantization in figure eight fiber laser", Electron. Lett., vol. 28, pp.  67-68, 1992.
  33. J. P. Gordon, "Dispersive perturbations of solitons of the nonlinear Schrödinger equation", J. Opt. Soc. Amer. B, vol. 9, pp.  91-97, 1992.