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IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics

Strong Optical Bistability in a Simple LLL -Band Tunable Erbium-Doped Fiber Ring Laser

Jung Mi Oh, Dong-Han Lee

Published Mar 30, 2004• 40 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We demonstrate strong optical bistability in a widely tunable L-band erbium-doped fiber ring laser pumped by a 980-nm laser diode. The bistable region is as much as 150-mW wide and can be controlled by the lasing wavelength or the length of erbium-doped fiber. The mechanism for the bistability is not typical cross gain saturation in a two-mode operation, but rather saturable absorption strongly enhanced in the proposed scheme.

DOI
10.1109/jqe.2004.824699

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We demonstrate strong optical bistability in a widely tunable L-band erbium-doped fiber ring laser pumped by a 980-nm laser diode. The bistable region is as much as 150-mW wide and can be controlled by the lasing wavelength or the length of erbium-doped fiber. The mechanism for the bistability is not typical cross gain saturation in a two-mode operation, but rather saturable absorption strongly enhanced in the proposed scheme.
The authors investigate the optical bistability in an L-band dual-wavelength erbium-doped fiber (EDF) laser with overlapping cavities. The bistable input-output hysteresis behavior of the two lasing wavelengths evolves in antiphase. The bistable region is tens of milliwatts wide. The bistability is essentially due to the homogeneous saturable absorption of EDF. The cross-gain saturation causes the bistabilities of the two lasing lines to evolve in antiphase with respect to each other. The gain clamping effect helps to widen the bistable region, which may be controlled by the cavity loss and by the EDF length.
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.
We observed a large optical bistability in a single-frequency thulium fiber laser with ring cavity configuration. A piece of unpumped Tm-doped fiber served as nonlinear saturable absorber (SA), which also acted as a narrow-bandpass filter by forming self-induced gratings with counter-propagate lasers and enabled single-frequency laser operation at 1720 nm. Due to the large absorption cross section of thulium ions at 1720 nm, the unpumped Tm-doped fiber has large variable losses, hence resulting in strong optical bistability. With 0.75-m SA fiber, a 4.8-W wide bistable region was achieved. The evolution of bistable region with different lengths of SA fibers was investigated. The bistable region became narrower with decreasing SA fiber length, and totally disappeared at a SA fiber length of 0.15 m. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first observation of optical bistability in thulium fiber lasers.
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.