Hysteresis phenomenon and multistability in figure-of-eight microstructured fiber laser

Abstract

We report a theoretical investigation of multi-pulse emission of a microstructured figure-ofeight fiber laser operating in passive mode-locking. The proposed laser is mode locked by the nonlinear amplifying loop mirror (NALM). We study, in this paper, the hysteresis dependence and the number of pulses in steady state as a function of both the small signal gain and the nonlinear coefficient of microstructured fiber. The numerical simulation confirms that the pulse splitting is a consequence of the energy quantization in anomalous dispersion. Moreover, our results suggest that the hysteresis phenomenon is an intrinsic feature of the mode-locked fiber lasers independently of the exact mode-locking mechanism. Finally, we identify that the nonlinear coefficient of microstructured fiber plays a key role in the formation of multi-soliton.

Pump power induced instability and hysteresis in an all-normal dispersion linear mode-locked fiber laser

“…Although dissipative solitons are capable to carry higher pulse energy than conventional solitons, single to multi-pulse transition also occurs in the dispersion-managed or normal dispersion regime, due to gain-bandwidth limitation or spectral filtering effect [15,16]. Often the transition from a singlepulse state to a multi-pulse state can be chaotic containing several intermittent events such as explosions and rogue waves [17,18]. Other than spectral filtering, change in cavity polarization state or cavity gain which affects the saturable absorption characteristics in a non-linear polarization evolution(NPE) or nonlinear optical loop mirror based ring cavity, have been reported to cause stationary to chaotic state transitions in mode-locked fiber lasers [19,20].…”

80 fs passively mode-locked Er-doped fiber laser

“…This technology is well-established, although it suffers from a limited operation bandwidth and a complex and expensive fabrication process. The use of a nonlinear amplifying loop mirror is also very common [24]. The use of novel, unconventional saturable absorbers, i.e.…”

Narrow-linewidth double-peak figure-eight passively mode-locked fiber laser

“…All-fiber passively mode-locked fiber lasers have been extensively investigated in the past for generating ultrashort pulses [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. A variety of all-fiber configurations and passively mode-locked techniques were proposed, such as a nonlinear optical loop mirror (NOLM) or a nonlinear amplifier loop mirror (NALM) [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16], the nonlinear polarization rotation technique (NPR) [17], the atomic layer grapheme [18] and nanotube [19]. Those techniques have a similar feature, they create high losses in wings and weak attenuation in the central part of a pulse leading to the formation of ultrashort pulses.…”