Noise and stability of actively modelocked fiber lasers

The timing jitter of a modelocked laser is fundamentally limited by the amplified spontaneous emission in the laser cavity. While one cannot, even in principle, remove this source of noise, one does have control over the pulse timing by using filtering and modulation. In this thesis, we report on the advances made in developing the understanding of timing jitter and stability in actively modelocked soliton fiber lasers. The main achievements reported here are: the development of a theory for quantum-limited timing jitter for the cases of amplitude and phase modulation (AM and PM, respectively); identification of a set of characteristic coefficients governing the physics of pulse retiming that depend on the laser parameters; construction of an apparatus-including the development of harmonically modelocked soliton fiber lasers in both a ring and a sigma configuration-to measure the predicted coefficients; and residual phase-noise measurements of the quantum-limited timing jitter using homodyne detection. The measurements of the characteristic coefficients and the timing jitter were found to be in good agreement with the theory. In addition, a theory for the case of harmonic modelocking was developed, and it is shown that the supermodes reveal pulse-to-pulse correlation statistics and must be included in measurements and calculations of the timing jitter. For the case of uncorrelated timing jitter between different pulses in the laser cavity, the supermodes are predicted to have the same timing jitter spectrum as the baseband mode, and this is confirmed by measurements.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2002

Author dc:creator

• Grein, Matthew Edward, 1970-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Erich Ippen and Hermann Haus.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/29237

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/29237