Passive harmonic mode-locking of a soliton Yb fiber laser at repetition rates to 15 GHz

Abstract

We report passive harmonic mode locking of a soliton Yb fiber laser at repetition rates continuously scalable up to 1.5 GHz. The laser generates transform-limited 500 fs pulses, with pulse energies of 30-100 pJ. At the 31st harmonic (1.3 GHz), the cavity supermodes are suppressed by 35 dB, and the pulse-to-pulse timing jitter is 6 ps.

Passive harmonic mode locking of gain-guided solitons in erbium-doped fiber lasers

“…Passive harmonic mode locking is a well-known phenomenon in fiber lasers and has been extensively investigated [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11] . Through harmonic mode locking the pulse repetition rate of a laser can be significantly increased with respect to its cavity fundamental repetition rate.…”

“…It was proposed to use the technique to generate high repetition rate lasers for the optical communication and precision optical sampling applications. Passive mode locking has been observed in various types of fiber lasers, such as the figure of eight fiber lasers [1] , fiber lasers with saturable absorber [6,7] , fiber lasers mode locked with the nonlinear polarization rotation (NPR) technique [3,[8][9][10][11] . When a fiber laser operates in the anomalous cavity dispersion regime, generally after modelocking is achieved, soliton shaping of the mode-locked pulses automatically occurs as a result of the natural balance between the anomalous cavity dispersion and the fiber nonlinear Kerr effect.…”

“…In addition to the passive harmonic mode locking of fiber lasers with anomalous cavity dispersion [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] , Deng et al [10] and Abedin et al [11] have also studied passive harmonic mode locking in dispersion-managed fiber lasers with slightly net normal cavity dispersion, where the dispersion-managed solitons can be formed. In fact, solitary pulses can also be formed in fiber lasers made of purely normal dispersion fibers [12] or in the dispersionmanaged fiber lasers with net positive cavity dispersion [13] .…”

Passively harmonic mode-locked erbium-doped fiber laser at a 580 MHz repetition rate based on carbon nanotubes film

“…Thus far, a passive mode-locking (PML) fiber laser with some unique features of compact size, superior heat dissipation performance, and fairly easy maintenance has motivated much interest. There are various approaches to obtain mode-locked pulses, such as nonlinear polarization rotation (NPR) [13,14] , nonlinear optical loop mirror (NOLM) [15] , semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESEAM) [16] , and the carbon-based saturable absorbers (SAs), including nanoscale graphite [17] , charcoal [18] , and carbon nanotubes (CNTs) [19][20][21] . In fact, most of them have also been demonstrated to achieve HML.…”

Fabry–Pérot filter cavities for wide-spaced frequency combs with large spectral bandwidth

“…Even though it may be possible to further increase this repetition rate, Ti:sapphire lasers so far require continuous attention that adds significant complexity when spectra have to be averaged for long observation times. An alternative would be to operate mode-locked lasers not with a single intracavity pulse but with an intracavity train of pulses with constant temporal spacing [8] or to use an intracavity Fabry-Pérot filter to generate multiply pulses [9]. In these cases though the limited available average power of most lasers is distributed among more pulses per second so that the necessary peak power for spectral broadening is difficult to achieve.…”