Refined fiber laser model

Abstract

With modification, a recently proposed laser array model is found to agree quantitatively with fiber laser experiments. Comparisons of transient behavior, stable dynamical states, and transitions are made using both previously published and new experiments. While the original model agrees well for fibers with relatively low losses, achieving quantitative agreement over a wide range of operating conditions requires more physically appropriate descriptions of gain dynamics. The refined model is derived, and its predictions are found to be in excellent agreement with experiments.

Effect of Gain-Dependent Phase Shift on Fiber Laser Synchronization

“…This model is a refined version of the one introduced in [10] appropriate for four-level lasers; we will consider the three-level case later in the paper. This model has been shown to accurately reproduce various experimental observations reported for single-and coupled-fiber systems [13], [18]. A schematic of the system is shown in Fig.…”

“…Despite some success in the laboratory and some success in modeling these systems [10]- [13], the key mechanism responsible for the synchronized behavior is still in question. Besides the obvious fundamental scientific interest, understanding the mechanism may be important if one ever hopes to achieve synchronization for very large arrays [14]- [16].…”

Coherence between two coupled lasers from a dynamics perspective

“…Although not all fiber laser systems suffer from the self-pulsing instability, it most often appears at pump levels near threshold in high-gain fiber lasers operated with heavy cavity losses [24,25,26]. However, the underlying dynamical state does not affect time-averaged extraction curves from single or coupled lasers because the time-averaged intensity of a pulse train is identical to the value of the unstable cw state at a given pump rate [21].…”

“…(2), details operation of a fiber laser in a three-level scheme [21]. We adopt this form since the experiments we consider used erbium-doped fiber lasers.…”

“…In a three-level lasing scheme, the forward-travelling electric fields E 1,2 and gains G 1,2 of the individual fibers, starting in Fig. 1 immediately before the output coupler, are explicitly transformed in one pass through their respective cavities over a round-trip time T according to [20,21] After an initial pass through the coupler, denoted by the matrix S in Eq. (1), the emerging electric fields propagate towards the output facets with respective reflection coefficients r 1,2 .…”