We study experimentally the time dependence, steady state behavior and spectra of a dual fiber-laser compound cavity. Theoretically we confirm the CW and spectral characteristics. This particular cavity is formed with two Er-doped fiber amplifiers, each terminated with a fiber Bragg grating, and coupled through a 50/50 coupler to a common feedback and output coupling element. The experiment and theory show that a low Q, high gain symmetric compound cavity extracts nearly 4 times the power of a component resonator. This extraction is maintained even when there is significant difference in the optical pathlengths of the two component elements. Further, our measurements and theory show that the longitudinal modes of the coupled cavity are distinct from the modes of the component cavities and that the coherence is formed on a mode-by-mode basis using these coupled-cavity modes. The time behavior of the compound cavity shows slow fluctuations, on the order of seconds, consistent with perturbations in the laboratory environment.

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We derive equations for the ASE intensity, decay time, and heat load. The crux of our development is frequency integration over the gain lineshape followed by a spatial integration over the emitters. These integrations result in a gain length that is determined from experiment. We measure the gain as a function of incident pump power for a multi-pass pumped Yb:YAG disk doped at 9.8 at.% with an anti-ASE cap. The incident pump powers are up to 3kW. Our fit to the measured gain is within 10% of the measured gain up to pump powers where the gain starts to flatten out and roll over. In this comparison we extract the gain length that turns out to be 43% of the pump spot size of 7mm.

We investigate stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) threshold in single mode and multimode fibers in an all fiber network. The pump is a single mode fiber pigtail attached to a diode. We find the theory and experiment agree for both single mode and multimode GRIN fibers. We modify the bulk SBS threshold equation for use with fibers by properly accounting for mode sizes and modal dispersion.