Description
External injection into mode-locked laser using continuous-wave (CW) or coherent pulsed lasers has become one of the most widely adopted approaches for generating phase-locked optical pulses. Existing techniques typically rely on injecting CW beams close to the central frequency of the mode-locked pulses. The resulted phase-locking is generally limited to the local spectral components of the pulse, without substantially modifying its overall characteristics.
In contrast to the previous injection mode-locking approach, we propose in this work a fundamentally different approach by injecting a continuous-wave laser at the frequency of the dispersive wave emitted within a fibre mode-locked laser. By exploiting dispersion management in a fibre cavity at telecommunication band, we will first generate the dispersive waves at controllable frequencies using commercially available optical fibres of different dispersion profiles and achieve mode-locking using a SESAM. Specifically, the mode-locked pulses will be generated in the anomalous dispersion regime, while emitting the dispersive wave into the normal-dispersion regime. The experimental platform will be built using telecommunications components, with the cavity designed to have an average zero-dispersion wavelength of approximately 1560 nm, enabling our later injection of a tunable CW laser within the C-band in the normal dispersion regime.
The control of the dispersive wave emission frequency in this fibre mode-locked laser will establish a versatile dispersion-managed laser platform for future investigations on the nonlinear dynamics of injection mode-locking.
| I am the presenting author | Yes |
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