ULTRASHORT-PULSE FIBER LASER WITH A DISPERSION-MANAGED CAVITY

摘要

The ultrashort fiber laser with a dispersion-managed cavity. The laser is an actively mode-locked sigma laser, typically locked at a repetition rate of 10 GHz, driven by an external frequency source and actively length stabilized, and nearly 10,000 pulses circulate within the laser cavity. A Mach-Zehnder modulator is placed in a loop of polarization-maintaining (PM) fiber. The polarization state of light injected into the non-PM branch evolves in a random manner but is transformed into an orthogonal state by a Faraday mirror; linearly polarized light injected into the branch by a polarizing beamsplitter returns to the beamsplitter also linearly polarized but rotated by 90°. The cavity of the laser is composed of several fibers. The average dispersion Dav is anomalous and is approximately equal to 0.1 ps/ (nm.km). The measured noise in the output of the laser is very low; the rms amplitude noise is less than 0.1 percent over a frequency range of 10 Hz - 1 MHz, and the rms timing filter is less than 10 femtoseconds over a frequency range of 100 Hz - 1 MHz.