Performance Comparison of Mode-Locked Erbium-Doped Fiber Laser with Nonlinear Polarization Rotation and Saturable Absorber Approaches

Abstract

A mode-locked erbium-doped fiber laser (EDFL) is demonstrated using a highly concentrated erbium-doped fiber (EDF) as the gain medium in a ring configuration with and without a saturable absorber (SA). Without the SA, the proposed laser generates soliton pulses with a repetition rate of 12 MHz, pulse width of 1.11 ps and energy pulse of 1.6 pJ. By incorporating SA in the ring cavity, the optical output of the laser changes from soliton to stretched pulses due to the slight change in the group velocity dispersion. With the SA, a cleaner pulse is obtained with a repetition rate of 11.3 MHz, a pulse width of 0.58 ps and a pulse energy of 2.3 pJ.

A passively harmonically mode‐locked soliton erbium‐doped fiber laser with low pumping threshold using a single‐walled carbon nanotubes

“…Passively mode‐locked soliton erbium‐doped fiber lasers (EDFLs) have been used as sources in many applications ranging from basic research to telecommunications, medicine, and materials processing. They enjoy many advantages over their active counterparts such as simplicity, tenability, pico‐ and femtosecond operation . When the pump power extends beyond a certain value, multipulses will form in the cavity because of energy quantization effect .…”

Nonadiabatic microfiber based mode‐locked erbium‐doped fiber laser using graphene

“…The mode‐locked erbium‐doped fiber lasers (EDFLs) have been reckoned to have extensive potential applications in high capacity wireless personal area networks, spectroscopy, bioengineering, sensor, and optical communication . They can be passively configured using semiconductor saturable absorber (SESAM) and nonlinear polarization rotation (NPR) . However, SESAMs are relatively expensive, have thermal limitation and fragile .…”

Mode-locked thulium–bismuth codoped fiber laser using graphene saturable absorber in ring cavity

“…Mode-locked fiber lasers currently attract great interest due to their extensive applications in telecommunication, imaging, spectroscopy, and medicine [1][2][3]. In this laser, the random phases of oscillating modes are phase locked to produce a single pulse [4], which can be realized by two main methods: active and passive.…”