Wake mode sidebands and instability in mode-locked lasers with slow saturable absorbers

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ol42122362.pdf (1.61 MB)

Links to Files

https://opg.optica.org/ol/abstract.cfm?uri=ol-42-12-2362

Permanent Link

https://doi.org/10.1364/OL.42.002362
 http://hdl.handle.net/11603/38690

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UMBC Faculty Collection
UMBC Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department
UMBC Student Collection

Author/Creator

Author/Creator ORCID

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5002-1657
 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0269-8433
 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9712-4995

Date

2017-06-15

Type of Work

journal articles
Text

Department

Program

Citation of Original Publication

Wang, Shaokang, Stefan Droste, Laura C. Sinclair, Ian Coddington, Nathan R. Newbury, Thomas F. Carruthers, and Curtis R. Menyuk. “Wake Mode Sidebands and Instability in Mode-Locked Lasers with Slow Saturable Absorbers.” Optics Letters 42, no. 12 (June 15, 2017): 2362–65. https://doi.org/10.1364/OL.42.002362.

Rights

This work was written as part of one of the author's official duties as an Employee of the United States Government and is therefore a work of the United States Government. In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 105, no copyright protection is available for such works under U.S. Law.
Public Domain

Subjects

Mirrors
UMBC Computational Photonics Laboratory
Saturable absorbers
Fiber lasers
Frequency combs
Mode-locked fiber lasers
Semiconductor lasers
UMBC Optical Fiber Communications Laboratory

Abstract

Passively mode-locked lasers with semiconductor saturable absorption mirrors are attractive comb sources due to their simplicity, excellent self-starting properties, and their environmental robustness. These lasers, however, can have an increased noise level and wake mode instabilities. Here, we investigate the wake mode dynamics in detail using a combination of evolutionary and dynamical methods. We describe the mode-locked pulse generation from noise when a stable pulse exists and the evolution of the wake mode instability when no stable pulse exists. We then calculate the dynamical spectrum of the mode-locked pulse, and we show that it has six discrete eigenmodes, two of which correspond to wake modes. The wake modes are unstable when the wake mode eigenvalues have a positive real part. We also show that even when the laser is stable, the wake modes lead to experimentally observed sidebands.