Generation and Propagation of Short Pulses in the 1.3 µm Optical Communication Window<br />DOI: 10.14209/jcis.1996.7

Abstract

A experimental study on short pulse generation from praseodymium-doped fluoride mode-locked fibre lasers and gain-switched DFB semiconductor laser is presented[l]. The fiber lasers were modelocked either by using a phase modulator (PM) or cross phase modulation (XPM). In the first case, pulses of 33 ps and 75 mW (peak power) at 419 MHz were obtained. In the second case, we used a 1.55 µn gain-switched diode laser to modulate the phase of the 1.3 um laser field via intracavity XPM. This produced 50 ps, 13 mW pulses at 2.8 GHz. In this second laser we also observed stable dark pulses with 140 to 220 ps duration, making this laser attractive as a dark soliton generator. In the case of the gain-switched (GS) diode laser, we obtained (after spectral filtering) 5 ps, 20 mW at 1 GHz. Using this GS laser we propagated solitons in 50 km of standard fibre, thus demonstrating its potentials as a simple and inexpensive soliton quality laser source.