The generation of stable short optical pulses in mode-locked lasers is of tremendous importance for many applications. Mode-locking is a broad concept that encompasses different processes enabling short pulse formation. It typically requires an intracavity mechanism that discriminates between single and collective mode lasing, which can be complex and sometimes adds noise. Moreover, known mode-locking schemes do not guarantee phase stability of the carrier wave. Here we theoretically propose that injecting a detuned signal seamlessly leads to mode-locking in fiber lasers. We show that phase-locked pulses, akin to cavity solitons, exist in a wide range of parameters. In that regime the laser behaves as a passive resonator due to the non-instantaneous gain saturation.
We report on large energy pulse generation in an erbium-doped fiber laser passively mode-locked with atomic layer graphene. Stable mode locked pulses with single pulse energy up to 7.3 nJ and pulse width of 415 fs have been directly generated from the laser. Our results show that atomic layer graphene could be a promising saturable absorber for large energy mode locking.
We propose an all-fiber mode-locking device which operates based on nonlinear switching in a novel concentric ring core fiber structure. The design is particularly attractive given the ease of fabrication and coupling to other components in a mode-locked fiber laser cavity. The nonlinear switching in this coupler is studied and the relative power transmission is obtained. The analysis shows that this nonlinear switch is practical for mode-locking fiber lasers and is forgiving to fabrication errors.
We experimentally demonstrate the realization of a half-polarization-maintaining (half-PM) fiber laser, in which mode-locking is provided by a reflective multimode-interference saturable absorber (SA). In the specially designed SA, linearly polarized light is coupled into a 15-cm-long graded-index multimode fiber (GIMF) through the PM fiber, and then reflected back to the PM structure through a mirror pigtailed with a single-mode fiber (SMF). The modulation depth and saturation peak power are measured to be 1.5% and 0.6 W, respectively. The proposed SA device is incorporated into a novel half-…
We introduce a mechanism of stable spatiotemporal soliton formation in a multimode fiber laser. This is based on spatially graded dissipation, leading to distributed Kerr-lens mode-locking. Our analysis involves solutions of a generalized dissipative Gross-Pitaevskii equation. This equation has a broad range of applications in nonlinear physics, including nonlinear optics, spatiotemporal patterns formation, plasma dynamics, and Bose-Einstein condensates. We demonstrate that careful control of dissipative and non-dissipative physical mechanisms results in the self-emergence of stable (2+1)-dime…
We review the conventional phase-locking technique in the long-term stabilization of the mode-locked fiber laser and investigate the phase noise limitation of the conventional technique. To break the limitation, we propose an improved phase-locking technique with an optic-microwave phase detector in achieving the ultra-low phase noise and phase drift. The mechanism and the theoretical model of the novel phase-locking technique are also discussed. The long-term stabilization experiments demonstrate that the improved technique can achieve the long-term stabilization for the MLFL with ultra-low p…
We demonstrate the first multimode fiber interference-based filtering in an all-fiber spatiotemporally mode-locked laser. The oscillator generates dissipative soliton pulses at 1036 nm with 12 mW average power, 6.24 ps duration and 24.3 MHz repetition rate. The reported pulse energy (0.5 nJ) represents ~4 times improvement over the previously reported single-mode all-normal dispersion mode-locked lasers with multimode interference-based filtering. Numerical simulations are performed to reveal cavity and spatiotemporal mode-locking dynamics. The proposed oscillator presents an alternative appro…
A laser is based on the electromagnetic modes of its resonator, which provides the feedback required for oscillation. Enormous progress has been made in controlling the interactions of longitudinal modes in lasers with a single transverse mode. For example, the field of ultrafast science has been built on lasers that lock many longitudinal modes together to form ultrashort light pulses. However, coherent superposition of many longitudinal and transverse modes in a laser has received little attention. The multitude of disparate frequency spacings, strong dispersions, and complex nonlinear inter…
We explore the practical challenges which should be addressed when designing a multi-core fiber coupler for nonlinear switching or mode-locking applications. The inevitable geometric imperfections formed in these fiber couplers during the fabrication process affect the performance characteristics of the nonlinear switching device. Fabrication uncertainties are tolerable as long as the changes they impose on the propagation constant of the modes are smaller than the linear coupling between the cores. It is possible to reduce the effect of the propagation constant variations by bringing the core…
We report a laser noise reduction method by locking it to an actively stabilized fiber-based Mach Zehnder interferometer with 10 km optical fiber to achieve large arm imbalance. An acousto optic modulator is used for interferometer stabilization and heterodyne detection. The out-of-loop frequency noise is reduced by more than 90 dB for Fourier frequency at 1 Hz. This structure presents an efficient laser noise reduction method both at high Fourier frequency and low Fourier frequency. The signal of stabilized laser is transferred via a 10 km fiber link with a fractional frequency stability of 1…
We report the frequency stabilization of an erbium-doped fiber distributed-feedback laser using an all-fiber based Michelson interferometer of large arm imbalance. The interferometer uses a 1 km SMF-28 optical fiber spool and an acousto optic modulator allowing heterodyne detection. The frequency noise power spectral density is reduced by more than 40 dB for Fourier frequencies ranging from 1 Hz to 10 kHz, corresponding to a level well below 1 Hz^2/Hz over the whole range. It reaches 10^{-2} Hz^2/Hz at 1 kHz. Between 40 Hz and 30 kHz, the frequency noise is shown to be comparable to the one ob…
Yes, it is possible to phase lock 25 fiber lasers but only for a short time. Our experiments on passively phase locking two-dimensional arrays of coupled fiber lasers reveal that the average phase locking level of 25 lasers is low ($20%-30%$) but can exceed 90% on rare instantaneous events. The average phase locking level was found to decrease for larger number of lasers in the array and increase with the connectivity of the array.
We present a comprehensive study of dispersion managed ultrashort-pulse generation in Nd-doped polarization maintaining all-fiber laser at a 920 nm wavelength. We implement a linear laser scheme with a chirped fiber Bragg grating (CFBG) serving as a semitransparent mirror and semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM) as a mode-locker and as a second non-transparent mirror. Complete 1064 nm emission filtering is ensured by 920/1064 wavelength division multiplexer. The dispersion compensation by CFBG was sufficient to reach anomalous net dispersion in the shortest laser scheme allowing us …
Optoelectronic down-conversion of a THz optical beatnote to a RF intermediate frequency is performed with a standard Mach-Zehnder modulator followed by a zero dispersion-slope fiber. The two interleaved optical spectra obtained by four-wave mixing are shown to contain more than 75 harmonics enabling to conveniently recover the phase noise of a beatnote at 770 GHz at around 500 MHz. This four-wave mixing down-conversion technique is implemented in a two-frequency solid-state laser in order to directly phase-lock its 168 GHz beatnote to a 10 MHz local oscillator.
We report a passively mode-locked erbium-doped fiber laser with pulsewidths switchable from 473 fs to 76.8 ns, where the fundamental mode-locking, noise-like pulse, nanosecond mode-locking, and dual-width mode-locking are obtained by adjusting a polarization controller. Co-existence of femto- and nano-second pulses in dual-width mode-locking is attributed to the gain balancing. Analytic modeling of the fiber laser with cubic-quintic Ginzburg-Landau equation is presented, in which the pulsewidths are calculated as functions of dispersion, saturable absorption, and self-phase modulation. The gen…
Moving the fiber laser emission to the region below one micron may provide a cheaper, more compact and robust alternatives to the existing solid state lasers. Here, for the first time we report a neodymium mode-locked fiber laser emitting at 905 nm in the all-fiber polarization maintaining configuration. We obtain a self-starting pulse generation in nonlinear amplifying loop mirror (NALM) cavity configuration. To suppress a dominant emission at 1064 nm corresponding to a 4-level laser scheme, we use an active fiber - 920/1064 division multiplexer - active fiber sandwich-like sequence in the NA…
We report on a simple method of locking a laser to a birefringent cavity using polarization spectroscopy. The birefringence of the resonator permits the simple extraction of an error signal by using one polarization state as a phase reference for another state. No modulation of the light or the resonator is required, reducing the complexity of the laser locking setup. This method of producing an error signal can be used on most birefringent optical resonators, even if the details of birefringence and eigenpolarizations are not known. This technique is particularly well suited for fiber ring re…
In this work, we introduce a method for stabilizing spatiotemporal solitons. These solitons correspond to light bullets in multimode optical fiber lasers, energy-scalable waveguide oscillators and amplifiers, localized coherent patterns in Bose-Einstein condensates, etc. We show that a three-dimensional confinement potential, formed by a spatial transverse (radial) parabolic graded refractive index and dissipation profile, combined with quadratic temporal phase modulation, may permit the generation of stable spatiotemporal dissipative solitons. This corresponds to combining phase mode-locking …
Nonlinear polarized evolution-based passively mode-locked fiber lasers with ultrafast and high peak power pulses are a powerful tool for engineering applications and research. However, their sensitivity to polarization limits their widespread application. To address this, automatic mode-locking immune to environmental disturbances is attracting more concerns. An experimental demonstration of the first real-time programmable mode-locked fiber laser is presented, which is enabled by our proposed human-like algorithm. It combines human logic with a machine's speed, computing capability, and preci…
Multimode nonlinear optics offers to overcome a long-standing limitation of fiber optics, tightly phase locking several spatial modes and enabling the coherent transport of a wavepacket through a multimode fiber. A similar problem is encountered in the temporal compression of multi-mJ pulses to few-cycle duration in hollow gas-filled fibers. Scaling the fiber length to up to six meters, hollow fibers have recently reached 1 TW of peak power. Despite the remarkable utility of the hollow fiber compressor and its widespread application, however, no analytical model exists to enable insight into t…
We have used injection locking to multiply the repetition rate of a passively mode-locked femtosecond fiber laser from 40 MHz to 1 GHz while preserving optical phase coherence between the master laser and the slave output. The system is implemented almost completely in fiber and incorporates gain and passive saturable absorption. The slave repetition rate is set to a rational harmonic of the master repetition rate, inducing pulse formation at the least common multiple of the master and slave repetition rates.
We demonstrate self-started mode-locking in an Erbium-doped fiber ring laser by using the nonlinear polarization rotation mode-locking technique but without an isolator in cavity. We show that due to the intrinsic effective nonlinearity discrimination of the mode-locked pulse propagating along different cavity directions, the soliton operation of the laser is always unidirectional, and its features have no difference to that of the unidirectional lasers with an isolator in cavity.
This paper describes a mode locking technique based on enhanced polarization dependent loss (PDL). The method utilizes a bent single mode fiber (SMF28) coil to induce sufficient PDL at 2 \(μ\)m wavelength region. Significant PDL in SMF28 coils is enabled since the light is much more weakly guided. A passively mode-locked thulium doped all-fiber laser is demonstrated using this simple device with polarization controllers as mode locker. The results indicate a moderate amount of 1 dB is sufficient to initiate and sustain stable mode-locking operation. We believe, to the best of our knowledge, th…
We demonstrate self-started unidirectional dissipative soliton operation and noise-like pulse operation in an all-normal-dispersion bidirectional Yb-doped fiber laser mode-locked by nonlinear polarization rotation. The laser works unidirectional once mode locking was achieved due to the cavity directional nonlinearity asymmetry along with the nonlinear polarization rotation mode locking mechanism.
The optoelectronic oscillator is a delay line oscillator that leverages optical fiber technology to realize the large delay required for low phase noise systems. Spurious sidemodes are an artifact of the delay line oscillator, yet treatments of injection locking of optoelectronic oscillators have relied on the application of classical injection locking theory valid only for single mode oscillators. The large delay contributed by the optical fiber delay line is accounted for by classical theory only in part through the quality factor Q that captures the round-trip group delay in a neighborhood …
Phase-locking of large mode area Yb photonic crystal fiber amplifiers via stimulated Brillouin scattering phase conjugation is analyzed. The wavefront reversing mirrors are proposed for chirped pulse fiber laser networks. The chirp control via both nonresonant Kerr and resonant index is considered.
We demonstrate ultra-low timing jitter optical pulse trains from free- running, 80 MHz repetition rate, mode-locked Yb-fiber lasers. Timing jitter of various mode-locking conditions at close-to-zero intra-cavity dispersion (-0.004 to +0.002 ps2 range at 1040 nm center wavelength) is characterized using a sub-20-attosecond-resolution balanced optical cross-correlation method. The measured lowest rms timing jitter is 175 attoseconds when integrated from 10 kHz to 40 MHz (Nyquist frequency) offset frequency range, which corresponds to the record-low timing jitter from free-running mode-locked fib…
In this letter, we demonstrate the first all-fiber all-normal dispersion ytterbium-doped oscillator with nonlinear multimodal interference based saturable absorber capable to generate ultrashort dissipative soliton pulses. Additional to functioning as a saturable absorber, the use of multimode fiber segments between single mode fibers also ensures the bandpass filtering via multimode interference reimaging necessary to obtain dissipative soliton mode-locking. The oscillator generates dissipative soliton pulses at 1030 nm with 5.8 mW average power, 5 ps duration and 44.25 MHz repetition rate. P…
Two cw single-mode violet (397nm) diode lasers are locked to a single external-cavity master diode laser by optical injection locking. A double-pass 1.6GHz acousto-optic modulator is used to provide a 3.2GHz offset frequency between the two slave lasers. We achieve up to 20mW usable output in each slave beam, with as little as 25 μW of injection power at room temperature. An optical heterodyne measurement of the beat note between the two slave beams gives a linewidth of <=10Hz at 3.2GHz. We also estimate the free-running linewidth of the master laser to be approximately 3MHz, by optical hetero…
Vectorial nature of dissipative solitons (DSs) with high repetition rates is studied for the first time in a normal-dispersion fiber laser. Despite the fact that the formed DSs are strongly chirped and the repetition rate is greater than 100 MHz, polarization locked and polarization rotating group velocity locked vector DSs can be formed under 129.3 MHz fundamental mode-locking and 258.6 MHz harmonic mode-locking of the fiber laser, respectively. The two orthogonally polarized components of these vector DSs possess distinctly different central wavelengths and travel together at the same group …
Ultrafast lasers generating high repetition rate ultrashort pulses through various mode-locking methods can benefit many important applications including communication, materials processing, astronomical observation, etc. For decades, mode-locking based on dissipative four-wave-mixing (DFWM) has been fundamental in producing pulses with repetition rates on the order of gigahertz (GHz), where multiwavelength comb filters and long nonlinear components are elemental. Recently, this method has been improved using filter-driven DFWM, which exploits both the filtering and nonlinear features of silic…
Spatiotemporal solitons (STSs) are localized solitary waves in both space and time that involve complex linear and nonlinear processes. Optical STSs have been observed in various media, but they are difficult to be realized in multimode fibers due to their large modal dispersion. Here, we report STS mode-locking and spatiotemporal nonlinear dynamics in a step-index multimode fiber mediated by gain. Gain competition and energy redistribution among different spatial modes help nonlinearity effectively cancel both temporal splitting and spatial diffracting of the entire pulse (multicomponent soli…
We demonstrate the stabilization of two-dimensional nonlinear wave patterns by means of a dissipative confinement potential. Our analytical and numerical analysis, based on the generalized dissipative Gross-Pitaevskii equation, makes use of the close analogy between the dynamics of a Bose-Einstein condensate and that of mode-locked fiber laser, operating in the anomalous dispersion regime. In the last case, the formation of stable two-dimensional patterns corresponds to spatiotemporal mode-locking, using dissipation-enhanced mode cleaning. We analyze the main scenarios of pattern destabilizati…
After advent of graphene as a saturable absorber many experiments have been conducted to produce short pulse duration pulses. Here, we have measured the properties of flake-graphene saturable absorber mirrors of various flake sizes dependent on fabrication technique. These mirrors enabled us to obtain a large mode-locking bandwidth of 16nm in an erbium-doped fiber laser. Mirrors with large flake size and multi-layered thickness induce strong pulse shaping and reflect mode-locked train of pulses with very large bandwidths.
We experimentally study a fiber-based optical ring cavity integrated with a mechanical resonator mirror and an optical amplifier. The device exhibits a variety of intriguing nonlinear effects including synchronization and self-excited oscillation. Passively generated optical pulses are observed when the frequency of the optical ring cavity is tuned very close to the mechanical frequency of the suspended mirror. The optical power at the threshold of this process of mechanical mode locking is found to be related to quantum noise of the optical amplifier.
We demonstrate phase locking of a 729 nm diode laser to a 1542 nm master laser via an erbium-doped-fiber frequency comb, using a transfer-oscillator feedforward scheme which suppresses the effect of comb noise in an unprecedented 1.8 MHz bandwidth. We illustrate its performance by carrying out coherent manipulations of a trapped calcium ion with 99 % fidelity even at few-microsecond timescales. We thus demonstrate that transfer-oscillator locking can provide sufficient phase stability for high-fidelity quantum logic manipulation even without pre-stabilization of the slave diode laser.
The performance of fiber mode-locked lasers is limited due to the high nonlinearity induced by the spatial confinement of the single-mode fiber core. To massively increase the pulse energy of the femtosecond pulses, amplification is obtained outside the oscillator. Recently, spatiotemporal mode-locking has been proposed as a new path to fiber lasers. However, the beam quality was either highly multimode and/or with low pulse energy. Here we present an approach to reach high energy per pulse directly in the mode-locked multimode fiber oscillator with a near single-mode output beam. Our approach…
A compact, strictly all-fiber, picosecond pulse source based on ytterbium (Yb) doped fiber is described. Stable solitary mode-locking is obtained in a fiber-oscillator utilizing a carefully designed chirped fiber-Bragg-grating (C-FBG) for both dispersion control and spectral filtering. Self-starting is assured through the use of a fiber-coupled semiconductor-saturable-absorber-mirror (SESAM). The oscillator's 50MHz 3.8ps pulse-train output at 1064nm wavelength is amplified to 1.2W average power by an Yb doped fiber-amplifier, yielding 6.45ps parabolic pulses. Numerical simulations of the fiber…
We report on a mode-locked laser design using Yb-doped fiber lasers for low-noise frequency-comb generation. The frequency comb covers the spectral range from $700$ to $1400$ nm. Although this range is more practical for many measurements than that produced by the more commonly used Er-fiber lasers, it has been addressed in only a handful of reports, mainly due to the difficulty of generating a fully coherent supercontinuum at $1\;μ$m. We overcome this difficulty by a tailored design of the mode-locking dynamics that succeeds in generating energetic 33 fs-long pulses without even using higher-…
Saturable absorbers are a key component for mode-locking femtosecond lasers. Polymer films containing graphene flakes have recently been used in transmission as laser mode-lockers, but suffer from high nonsaturable loss, limiting their application in low-gain lasers. Here we present a saturable absorber mirror based on a film of pure graphene flakes. The device is used to mode lock an erbium-doped fiber laser, generating pulses with state-of-the-art, sub-200-fs duration. The laser characteristic indicate that the film exhibits low nonsaturable loss (13% per pass) and large absorption modulatio…
Dissipative Kerr soliton (DKS) frequency combs - also known as microcombs - have arguably created a new field in cavity nonlinear photonics, with a strong cross-fertilization between theoretical, experimental, and technological research. Spatiotemporal mode-locking (STML) not only add new degrees of freedom to ultrafast laser technology, but also provide new insights for implementing analogue computers and heuristic optimizers with photonics. Here, we combine the principles of DKS and STML for the first time to demonstrate the STML DKS by developing an unexplored ultrahigh-quality-factor Fabry…
Evanescent electromagnetic waves possess spin-momentum locking, where the direction of propagation (momentum) is locked to the inherent polarization of the wave (transverse spin). We study the optical forces arising from this universal phenomenon and show that the fundamental origin of recently reported non-trivial optical chiral forces is spin-momentum locking. For evanescent waves, we show that the direction of energy flow, direction of decay, and direction of spin follow a right hand rule for three different cases of total internal reflection, surface plasmon polaritons, and $HE_{11}$ mode …
From the point of view of the differential phase delay experienced by the two counterpropagating optical fields, the self-starting of the mode-locked fiber laser with a nonlinear amplifying loop mirror (NALM) is theoretically studied. Although it is generally believed that NALM shows a saturable absorption effect on both continuous wave (CW) light and pulses, we find a counter-intuitive fact that cross-phase modulation (XPM) leads to opposite signs of differential nonlinear phase shifts (NPSs) in these two cases, resulting in inverse saturable absorption (ISA) during pulse formation process. T…
We report on an ultralow noise optical frequency transfer from a remotely located Sr optical lattice clock laser to a Ti:Sapphire optical frequency comb through telecom-wavelength optical fiber networks. The inherent narrow linewidth of the Ti:Sapphire optical frequency comb eliminates the need for a local reference high-finesse cavity. The relative fractional frequency instability of the optical frequency comb with respect to the remote optical reference was $6.7(1) \times 10^{-18}$ at 1 s and $1.05(3) \times 10^{-19}$ at 1,000 s including a 2.9 km-long fiber network. This ensured the optical…
Ultrafast fiber lasers play important roles in many aspects of our life for their various applications in fields ranging from fundamental sciences to industrial purposes. Passive mode-locking technique is a key step to realize the ultrafast soliton fiber lasers. However, the booting dynamics of the soliton fiber lasers have not yet been well understood. Herein, we reveal the soliton buildup dynamics of ultrafast fiber lasers operating both in anomalous and net-normal dispersion regimes. Based on the advanced experimental methodologies of spatio-temporal reconstruction and dispersive Fourier tr…
We demonstrate a new fiber-based radio frequency dissemination scheme for branching networks. Without any phase controls on RF signals or usages of active feedback locking components, the highly stable reference frequency signal can be delivered to several remote sites simultaneously and independently. Relative frequency stability of 6E-15/s and 7E-17/1E4s is obtained for 10km dissemination. The proposed low cost and scalable method can be applied to some large-scale frequency synchronization networks.
High-power visible laser via injection locking to a photonic integrated circuit optical parametric oscillator
National Institute of Standards and Technology（美国国家标准与技术研究院）；Joint Quantum Institute, NIST/University of Maryland（NIST/马里兰大学联合量子研究所）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
