Polarisation maintaining figure 8 laser

Abstract

Passively mode-locked, erbium-doped fibre lasers have received considerable recent attention because of their ability to generate ultrashort, transform-limited soliton pulses. Figure-8, ring and linear cavity configurations have been developed based on nonlinear Sagnac and polarisation switches respectively. Pulse durations ranging from several picoseconds down effectively to the limit defined by the erbium bandwidth (~100 fs) have now been demonstrated directly at the output of such lasers. However, questions concerning the practical application of such lasers remain, particularly the question of environmental stability. The performance of passively mode-locked fibre lasers is generally critically dependant on the exact state of intracavity birefringence and this is sensitive to temperature, pressure and mechanical perturbation. The cleanest way to avoid the problem is to construct a laser system using polarisation-maintaining (PM) components and to operate the system on a single polarisation eigen-mode. A linear cavity PM erbium fibre laser employing bulk elements and a saturable absorber has recently been demonstrated. In this letter we report for the first time the performance of a self-starting, all-fibre, PM Figure-8 laser capable of generating high quality, transform-limited soliton pulses and exhibiting excellent environmental stability.

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ORCID for D.J. Richardson: orcid.org/0000-0002-7751-1058

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