Stable and broad bandwidth multiwavelength fiber ring laser incorporating a highly nonlinear photonic crystal fiber

Abstract

Abstract-A stable and broad bandwidth multiwavelength fiber ring laser suitable for use in dense wavelength-division-multiplexing systems is demonstrated. A highly nonlinear photonic crystal fiber is inserted in the ring cavity to stabilize the power fluctuation and broaden the output spectrum. A thin-film Fabry-Pérot etalon filter is used to get stable wavelength lasing. A Sagnac filter is employed to achieve uniform power distribution at each wavelength at the laser output. A laser with a power fluctuation about 0.1 dB in each wavelength within 20 min and with wavelength shift of less than 0.016 nm within 10 min is achieved. A stable 24-wavelength lasing operation with wavelength spacing of 0.8 nm within the 3-dB spectral range of 1573-1594 nm and signal-to-noise ratio better than 48 dB is observed experimentally. IndexTerms-Dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM), erbium-doped fiber, Fabry-Pérot (FP) etalon filter, four-wave mixing (FWM), multiwavelength fiber lasers, nonlinear optics, photonic crystal fiber (PCF).

Stability investigation of a multi-wavelength fiber linear cavity laser using a highly nonlinear fiber

“…However, because a standard single-mode fiber (SMF) usually has a rather small nonlinear coefficient a SMF several kilometers in length was utilized in this setup, reducing the flexibility of the multi-wavelength source [6]. In order to enhance the efficiency of FWM, several kinds of fiber have been inserted into the laser cavity, for example dispersion-shifted fiber (DSF) [7], photonic crystal fiber [8] and highly nonlinear fiber (HNLF). Because a HNLF has a relatively high nonlinear coefficient [9], gain competition can be mitigated significantly by cascaded FWM and the performance of a multi-wavelength laser in terms of stability and channel count is significantly improved.…”

Erbium-doped fiber ring laser with wavelength selective filter based on non-linear photonic crystal fiber Mach–Zehnder interferometer

“…These fiber laser sources have also been employed in fiber optic testing, fiber sensors, measurement of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) components, and spectroscopy [1][2][3]. The requirements of WDM systems are: large number of channels over a large wavelength span; moderated output power (of the order of 100 µW per channel), with power distributed uniformly over channels; stable, fixed wavelength spacing; and small power variation with high side-mode suppression ratio (SMSR) for each individual channel [4,5]. The main challenge in producing stable multi-wavelength lasing in erbium-doped fiber ring lasers (EDFRL) is the strong mode competition induced by the fact that erbium ions saturate mostly homogeneously at room temperature [4,6].…”

SOA-based quad-wavelength ring laser

“…Multi-wavelength laser sources have many potential applications such as in dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) systems [1,2], optical sensors [3], gas spectroscopy [4], and many others that require multiple wavelength outputs. These sources are attractive as their compact size and increased number of wavelengths per component makes them very cost-effective, and many methods have been put forward for the generation of such sources.…”