Soliton compression in Brillouin fiber lasers

Abstract

Pulse propagation in optical fibers may electrostrictively excite acoustic waves as a result of cladding Brillouin scattering, transversally propagating with respect to the fiber axis in the fiber's cladding, and mechanical coating. We show, for the first time to our knowledge, experimentally and theoretically that these transverse resonances within finite frequency ranges may cooperatively couple with the acoustic longitudinal modes of a fiber resonator, giving rise to stable trains of either spread or compressed three-wave Brillouin solitons and propose a first stability map for the rich four-wave dissipative dynamics.

CW-pumped polarization-maintaining Brillouin fiber ring laser: I. Self-structuration of Brillouin solitons

“…The coupling of the Brillouin transverse resonator with the Brillouin axial resonator is responsible for unstable dynamics, since all kind of transverse resonances may be excited. The pulses are either compressed, for certain cooperative frequencies, or widen and/or destabilized for other frequencies [14].…”

“…The experiment ( figure 1) is built around a L = 253 m single-mode and polarization preserving fiber (14) of attenuation α = 1 dB/km (Fibercore Ltd). A far field analysis at the wavelength λ p = 1.319 µm led to the mode radius r = 2.8 µm, and measurements in stationary conditions yield the Brillouin gain coefficient g B = 1.65 × 10 −11 m/W.…”

“…The coupler (10) takes 10% of this signal for measurement in (11) by a power-meter, whereas the main part is coupled through the microhandler (15) in the main fiber (14) with its optical po-larization orientated along one of the neutral axis. After the fiber (14), the pump signal is stopped at the port 3 of the circulator, preventing thus any perturbation of the input pump signal.…”

“…The ring is then closed by obtaining in (12) the backward signal, which is maximized by adjusting the polarization controller (17): the Stokes wave is now linearly polarized in the fiber (14) along the same neutral axis as the pump.…”

Sudden spontaneous acceleration and deceleration of gap-acoustic solitons

“…Notwithstanding different nomenclatures, the two effects have the same physical source. Brillouin scattering can cause light in a medium to create its own Bragg reflector, and if the input light is a pulse then the outgoing reflected pulse can be shortened by this effect [27][28][29][30][31].…”