Tunable 60 GHz Multiwavelength Brillouin Erbium Fiber Laser

Abstract

An experimental study of a tunable 60 GHz multiwavelength Brillouin erbium fiber laser is presented in this paper. Two unidirectional ring laser cavities and two pre-amplification laser cavities are used. In the first three cavities, a Brillouin gain medium is presented with a dispersion compensation fiber (DCF) spool, and a single-mode fiber (SMF) spool is used as a Brillouin gain medium in the fourth cavity. Three erbium amplifiers are utilized to supply enough gain to the generated Brillouin Stokes signal and to suppress cavity losses. For these three amplifiers, up to 450 mW (150 mW for each) of a 1480 nm pump power is used. In our proposed configuration, four sextuple Brillouin Stokes signals with a high power of 10 dBm and more than 55 dB as an optical signal-to-noise ratio are achieved. The obtained Brillouin Stokes signals can be tuned over 30 nm (1560–1590 nm) and can be easily used in dense wavelength division multiplexing in optics communication systems.

Keywords

• unidirectional cavity
• sextuple Brillouin channel spacing
• stimulated Brillouin scattering
• multi-wavelength generation