Stabilized pulse spacing in soliton lasers due to gain depletion and recovery

Author

Kutz, J. Nathan ; Collings, B.C. ; Bergman, K. ; Knox, W.H.

Author_Institution

Program in Appl. & Comput. Math., Princeton Univ., NJ, USA

Volume

34

Issue

9

fYear

1998

fDate

9/1/1998 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

1749

Lastpage

1757

Abstract

We consider the interpulse dynamics in harmonic passively mode-locked soliton lasers and find that gain depletion in conjunction with its recovery provides an effective repulsion force between adjacent solitons by imparting a group-velocity drift proportional to the interpulse spacings. Analytic descriptions for both the two-pulse and N-pulse per round-trip configurations demonstrate the stability of the equally spaced condition. These theoretical findings, which are supported by experimental results, hold in the limit where cavity losses and perturbations are small per round trip so that the weak gain depletion and recovery mechanisms can dominate the interpulse interactions

Keywords

laser cavity resonators; laser mode locking; laser stability; laser theory; optical losses; optical solitons; perturbation theory; adjacent solitons; cavity losses; effective repulsion force; equally spaced condition; gain depletion; gain recovery; group-velocity drift; harmonic passively mode-locked soliton lasers; interpulse dynamics; interpulse interactions; interpulse spacings; perturbations; round-trip configurations; soliton lasers; stabilized pulse spacing; Fiber lasers; Laser mode locking; Laser stability; Laser theory; Optical pulses; Pulse amplifiers; Pulse modulation; Quantization; Solitons; Stability analysis;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Quantum Electronics, IEEE Journal of

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9197

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/3.709592

Filename

709592