A highly stable low-RIN hybrid Brillouin/erbium amplified laser source

Abstract

We demonstrate a low-noise all-fiber hybrid Brillouin/erbium amplified source consisting of a Brillouin/erbium fiber laser with a subsequent Brillouin amplifier to boost the power and reduce the noise. The same single-mode fibers used in the fiber laser and the amplifier lead to the same amount of Stokes frequency shifts in spite of the environmental variation, ensuring stable Brillouin amplification. The hybridly amplified source features temperature insensitivity, low noise, potentially high power, and low cost. The relative intensity noise of the hybridly amplified source is 10 dB lower than that of the erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA)-based source at radio frequencies 200 MHz due to the filtering characteristics of the Brillouin amplification.Compared with an EDFA amplified fiber system, the spurious-free dynamic range of an analog transmission system employing such a laser source is improved by 7.7 dB owning to the lower RIN.

Large delay tunable slow-light based on high-gain stimulated-Brillouin-scattering amplification in optical fibers

“…This is the key to achieve the slow-light experiment. Recently, we demonstrated an ultra-stable fiber Brillouin amplifier, in which a Brillouin fiber laser (BFL) was injected as the signal source [21] . On a certain condition, the BFL may output the single-wavelength [22] ultra-narrow single-longitudinal-mode laser signal [23,24] .…”

“…Figure 3 shows the experimental scheme of the slow-light based on the SBS in optical fiber, which is similar to the configuration of the fiber Brillouin amplifier in ref. [21]. The 1550 nm-narrow linewidth light from a tunable laser (TNL) is pre-amplified to 16 dBm by an erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA1), and then divided into two beams by a 10:90 coupler.…”

“…Namely, the nonlinear gain equals the natural loss of the fiber. For the typical values associated with Brillouin scattering in the low loss single-mode fiber (SMF), the critical power for the SBS threshold is approximately given by [17] cr eff B eff 21 ,…”

Optical Generation of Tunable Microwave Signal Using Cascaded Brillouin Fiber Lasers

“…In the past years, three main approaches to optically generate tunable microwave frequency (TMF) have been demonstrated based on the heterodyning of two laser frequencies, either by two independent laser sources or by one laser with an external optical modulator or by a single laser source with dual-frequency outputs. In addition, BFLs as stable narrow-linewidth laser sources [3], have been extensively used in the TMF generation. In the first approach, two BFLs pumped by two independent fiber lasers are applied to generate the tunable microwave signal [4].…”

High power low RIN Brillouin fiber laser with optoelectronic oscillator configuration

“…Because SBS has very narrow bandwidth gain the signal-spontaneous beat noise can be lowered greatly with SBS. So Brillouin fiber lasers are the suitable sources that can provide high power and low RIN simultaneously [1][2][3][4]. There are two common methods to generate Brillouin fiber laser.…”