A fiber-ring laser incorporating dual mode-locking mechanism

A fiber-ring laser incorporating dual mode-locking mechanisms is presented and demonstrated. A multi-quantum well (MQW) semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) acts as active loss modulator, because the external optical signal injection results in gain depletion. In addition, a reflective SOA (RSOA) and a polarization beam splitter (PBS) introduce nonlinear polarization rotation (NPR), and also function as a saturable absorber. With this dual mode-locking mechanism, 10 GHz repetition-rate stable pulses, with pulse width of 16 ps and a root-mean-square timing jitter of 1 ps, was obtained without the use of external compression approaches.