Fiber Ring With Long Delay Used as a Cavity Mirror for Narrowing Fiber Laser

A fiber ring with an extremely low reflectivity fiber Bragg grating inserted as a slow-light component is proposed and demonstrated to be used as a cavity mirror with long delay for narrowing fiber laser linewidth. Due to the recirculating propagation and resonance in the ring composed of a low split ratio coupler, the composite ring provides not only a high enough reflectivity and extremely narrow bandwidth for laser oscillation, but also an enlarged group delay. The effective reflectance and group delay of the composite ring are discussed theoretically. Its effect of laser linewidth narrowing is verified experimentally in a laser with the composite fiber ring and a high reflectivity fiber Bragg grating as cavity mirrors. Its line shape, relative intensity noise (RIN), and frequency noise (FN) are measured, showing the full-width at half-maximum linewidth of 150 Hz, RIN and FN of less than -125 dB/Hz at 500 Hz and 30 Hz/√Hz at 500 Hz, respectively.

[1]  Z. Fang,et al.  Low-frequency noise suppression of a fiber laser based on a round-trip EDFA power stabilizer , 2013 .

[2]  K. Chin,et al.  Fundamentals of Optical Fiber Sensors , 2012 .

[3]  K. Kikuchi.  Characterization of semiconductor-laser phase noise and estimation of bit-error rate performance with low-speed offline digital coherent receivers. , 2012, Optics express.

[4]  Qing Ye,et al.  100-mW linear polarization single-frequency all-fiber seed laser for coherent Doppler lidar application , 2012 .

[5]  H. Tsuchida.  Characterization of White and Flicker Frequency Modulation Noise in Narrow-Linewidth Laser Diodes , 2011, IEEE Photonics Technology Letters.

[6]  S. Schilt,et al.  Simple approach to the relation between laser frequency noise and laser line shape. , 2010, Applied optics.

[7]  Y. Shevy,et al.  Slow light laser oscillator , 2010, 2010 Conference on Optical Fiber Communication (OFC/NFOEC), collocated National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference.

[8]  Qianhuan Zhang,et al.  An efficient compact 300 mW narrow-linewidth single frequency fiber laser at 1.5 microm. , 2010, Optics express.

[9]  G. A. Cranch,et al.  Distributed Feedback Fiber Laser Strain Sensors , 2008, IEEE Sensors Journal.

[10]  G. Stephan,et al.  Laser line shape and spectral density of frequency noise (9 pages) , 2005 .

[11]  Morten Ibsen,et al.  Linewidth and phase noise characteristics of DFB fibre lasers , 2004, SPIE Security + Defence.

[12]  A. Grudinin,et al.  Performance limitations of high-power DFB fiber lasers , 2003, IEEE Photonics Technology Letters.

[13]  H. Ludvigsen,et al.  Laser linewidth measurements using self-homodyne detection with short delay , 1998 .

[14]  L. B. Mercer,et al.  1/f frequency noise effects on self-heterodyne linewidth measurements , 1990 .

[15]  L. Richter,et al.  Linewidth determination from self-heterodyne measurements with subcoherence delay times , 1986 .