Low Noise High-Energy Dissipative Soliton Erbium Fiber Laser for Fiber Optical Parametric Oscillator Pumping

Abstract

We report on a mode-locked erbium-doped fiber laser delivering highly-chirped pulses with several tens of nanojoules of energy around 1560 nm and its exploitation to efficiently pump a fiber optical parametric oscillator (FOPO), thus enabling picosecond pulse generation around 1700 nm. The laser cavity features a high normal dispersion and mode-locking is sustained using tailored spectral filtering combined with nonlinear polarization evolution and a semiconductor saturable absorber. Numerical simulations show that the laser dynamics is governed by a strong mode-locking mechanism compensating for the large spectral and temporal pulse evolution along the cavity. In the frame of high energy picosecond pulse generation around 1700 nm, we then demonstrate that using highly-chirped pulses as pump pulses allows for the efficient tuning of the FOPO idler wavelength between 1620 and 1870 nm. In addition, satisfying noise characteristics have been achieved both for the Er-laser and the FOPO, with respective relative intensity noises (RIN) of −154 and −140 dBc/Hz, thus paving the way for the use of such sources in ultrafast instrumentation.

Nonlinear effects-based 1.7 μm fiber lasers: A review and prospect

“…After numerical simulations, they found that the best results could be obtained using a 7-meter-long DSF. By optimizing the pump wavelength and the temporal dispersion tuning of the FOPO, they obtained a picosecond pulsed laser output with tunable wavelengths from 1617-1876 nm, and the pulse energies with the average power of 14.3 mW at the wavelength of 1668 nm for a pump wavelength of ~1566nm, as shown in the Fig 13 . Later, they used the same experimental setup and increased the width of intra-cavity filter in pump source to optimize the parameter of chirped pulse (reached to 13 nJ, 35 ps) [49], achieving the picosecond ultrashort pulse with the average power of 204 mW. Figure 13.…”

Application of Hollow-Core Photonic Crystal Fibers in Gas Raman Lasers Operating at 1.7 μm

“…One is based on population inversion to generate 1.7 µm pulsed lasers by using rare-earth-doped fibers, such as thulium-doped fibers [6,7,10,11], thuliumholmium-codoped fibers [12,13], and bismuth-doped fibers [14][15][16]. The other is based on nonlinear effects in solid-core fibers to realize a frequency conversion, such as soliton self-frequency shift [17][18][19][20], four-wave mixing [21][22][23], self-phase modulation [7,24,25], and stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) [26]. Recently, fiber gas Raman lasers (FGRLs) based on hollow-core photonic crystal fibers (HC-PCFs) have opened a new opportunity for 1.7 µm pulsed fiber lasers [27][28][29][30].…”

Quantum field fluctuations in the vicinity of a classical laser soliton

“…It is worth noting the studies of quantum effects for dissipative solitons in the optical parametric oscillator [10]. For practically important temporal solitons in driven microresonators, the main noise sources are currently technical and thermal [11,12]. However, the limiting application possibilities of the solitons are determined precisely by quantum fluctuations.…”