Linewidth Narrowing of a Dual Wavelength-Selectable, Ring Cavity Erbium-Doped Fiber Laser Using a Saturable Absorber

Abstract

The narrow linewidth fiber laser is useful in applications such as fiber sensing, optical communications, and spectroscopy. This paper presents an investigation of the model and an experiment of a stable, wavelength-selective, narrow linewidth, ring cavity erbium-doped fiber laser incorporating two fiber Bragg gratings (FBG) at 1530.18 nm and 1550.08 nm, respectively. An F-P tunable filter was used to select a specific wavelength after optimizing the spectral output from the two FBGs to measure their respective linewidths. The erbium-doped ring fiber laser was optimized by adjusting the optical cavity loss using a variable optical coupler at a coupling ratio of 95%. The variable coupler was set to an optimal coupling ratio of 95%, where the spectral output powers of 3.4 mW at 1530.18 nm and 3.1 mW at 1550.08 nm were achieved as the optimal fiber laser output powers. The balanced output power had an optical signal-to-noise ratio of (OSNR) of 61 dB for each wavelength. The linewidth was measured for both wavelengths without saturable absorbers, and 27.7 kHz and 28.3 kHz for 1530.18 nm and 1550.08 nm were obtained. Using the saturable absorber, the linewidths were narrowed to 25.3 KHz and 21.1 kHz for 1530.18 nm and 1550.08 nm, respectively.

Keywords

• erbium-doped ring cavity fiber laser
• numerical model
• narrow linewidth
• saturable absorber