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Laser Physics

Fiber-ring laser with tunable optical bistability

Jiafeng Shao, Qin Shen, Z. J. Wu, Li Zhan, S. L. Li, Zhang Cao

Published Sep 1, 2008• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

The structure of combining two segments of erbium-doped fiber (EDF) together—one EDF acting as an amplifier and the other as an absorber—has a special gain characteristic curve which has a maximum gain with an increase in the input signal power. This special gain characteristic curve can lead to an optical bistability (OB) phenomenon in a fiber-ring laser employing an EDF of this structure. By adjusting the pump light power injected into the second segment of the EDF, we can change the behavior of the absorber and can, therefore, control the range of the bistability region. A method is proposed to calculate the tunable optical bistability, and the calculation result is in accordance with our experiment.

DOI
10.1134/s1054660x08090090

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The structure of combining two segments of erbium-doped fiber (EDF) together—one EDF acting as an amplifier and the other as an absorber—has a special gain characteristic curve which has a maximum gain with an increase in the input signal power. This special gain characteristic curve can lead to an optical bistability (OB) phenomenon in a fiber-ring laser employing an EDF of this structure. By adjusting the pump light power injected into the second segment of the EDF, we can change the behavior of the absorber and can, therefore, control the range of the bistability region. A method is proposed to calculate the tunable optical bistability, and the calculation result is in accordance with our experiment.
Optical bistability phenomenon in a single fiber ring laser employing erbium-doped fiber (EDF) as gain medium is observed in our experiment. In the EDF amplifiers, the photons of pump light cannot completely transfer into that of signal light because of various attenuation factors. This part of loss (useless pump loss) and active spontaneous emission (ASE) can both lower the small-signal gain of the EDF, and can eventually result in the bistability phenomenon. The range of this bistability has a complicated relationship with the length of the EDF, the erbium-ion doping concentration, the cavity loss and the useless loss coefficient of the pump light.
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In this paper we study the optical bistability in a double coupler fiber ring resonator which consists of an erbium doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) in half part of the fiber ring and a quantum dot doped fiber (QDF) saturable absorber in the other half. The bistability is provided by the QDF section of the ring resonator. The EDFA is employed to reduce the switching power. The transmitted and reflected bistability characteristics are investigated. It is shown that the switching power for this new bistable device is less than 10 mW.
We demonstrate a new scheme for realizing the Optical Bistability (OB) inside an all-fiber ring cavity with an external control field. In the absence of the external control field, the pump power is fixed below the threshold value of laser, and there is no laser in the cavity. However, when the control signal of 1505 nm to 1520 nm is injected into the cavity, laser begins to oscillate and OB appears. We found that the wavelength and power of the control signal can affect the OB behavior dramatically, which can be used to manipulate efficiently the threshold intensity and the hysteresis loop. We also give an explanation of the bistability phenomenon based on numerical simulations, which are agreed very well with our experimental results. Our scheme may provide some new possibilities for technological applications in optical power limiters, switches or memories.