The use of nonlinear dynamics of erbium-doped fiber laser at pump modulation for intra-cavity sensing

We report the use of nonlinear dynamics of an erbium-doped fiber laser (EDFL) at pump modulation, namely the period-1 pulsed regime, for intra-cavity loss sensing and demonstrate noticeable sensitivity enhancement of an EDFL-based sensor, provided by this arrangement. Experimentally, we obtain a ten-fold increase of the sensor response, i.e. peak-to-peak pulse amplitude against loss variation, as compared with the standard sensing schemes using a low-power wide-spectrum light emitting diode (LED) or fiber laser without external modulation. This advantage originates from a strong dependence of pulse amplitude in the period-1 regime on intra-cavity loss variable that is, in turn, determined by the interrelation of relaxation frequency (an internal EDFL parameter) and frequency and depth of external (pump) modulation. A modeling of the EDFL-based sensor, presented for the case when the laser operates in the period-1 regime, allows an insight into the sensor operation details and opens the gate to its further optimization. The proposed sensing method seems to be a proper choice for the applications where an intra-cavity sensor’s head has high internal loss (≥10 dB) while sensed loss is varied within a quite narrow range (a few dB).