Characteristics of Actively Mode-Locked Erbium

Doped Fiber Laser Utilizing Ring Cavity

Shaymaa Riyadh Tahhan Ahmad Atieh Mudhafar Hussein Ali

Laser and OptoelectronicEngineering Optiwave Systems Inc Network Engineering Department
Department Ottawa, Ontario College of Engineering
College of Engineering K2E 8A7 Canada Al–Iraqia University
Al–Nahrain University Ahmad.atieh@optiwave.com Baghdad, Iraq.
Baghdad, Iraq. muthafarh1@gmail.com
shaymaa.riyadh@gmail.com

Mehedi Hasan Abdulla Khudhiar Abass

School of Electrical Engineering and Laser Engineering Branch, Laser and Trevor Hall
Computer Science Optoelectronics Department School of Electrical Engineering and
University of Ottawa University of Technology Computer Science
Ottawa, Canada Baghdad, Iraq University of Ottawa
mehedi.hasan.sumon@gmail.com 140042@uotechnology.edu.iq Ottawa, Canada
trevor.hall@uottawa.ca

Abstract— A simple active mode-locked erbium-doped ring
fiber laser is proposed. The fiber laser operates in the
wavelength range 1525nm to 1565nm. A Gaussian pulse train
drives an intensity modulated placed inside the laser cavity.
The active mode-locked laser produces a train of pulses with
width as low as 30ps at a repetition rate of 1GHz.
Keywords—Active model-locked laser, ring laser, fiber laser
I. INTRODUCTION
Mode-locked fiber lasers have been demonstrated in the
past years for pulse train generation using passive or active
mode-locking effects [1-13]. Active mode-locking is
typically realized by inserting an external signal that drives a
modulator, while passive mode-locking does not require
external signal for the generation of pulses. Active mode-
locked fiber lasers can compress the input pulses and
produce much narrower pulses. However, their laser tuning
range is limited and requires complex fabrication and
packaging. Mode-locked fiber lasers have several advantages
over semiconductor lasers such as low thermal effects, high
pulsed power, high efficiency, simple architecture and
excellent beam quality [6]. These characteristics enabled
using mode-locked lasers in many applications such as fiber
optic communication [9], optical metrology [5], sensing [10]
and medical applications [11].
The cavity of passive or active mode-locked lasers is
typically made of an active medium to create noise seed, a
filter that picks a specific wavelength band of the seed to
allow mode-locking within that specific wavelength range,
and other pulses messaging components that could be either
alternative pieces of fibers with different dispersion profiles
[12], or chirped fiber Bragg grating [5, 13]. Different rare-
earth doped fibers have been used as the gain medium for the
fiber laser, where each doped material offers different
emission spectrum. The pulse train repetition rate of the fiber
laser depends on the cavity length, while the width of the
pulses depending on the messaging scheme and initial pluses
width used in the active mode-locked laser. The
demonstrated mode-locked lasers’ structures in the literature
are either relatively complex or have low repetition rate. In
this work, we propose a simple active mode-locked laser
structure that has high repetition rate and generates very
narrow pulses. A gaussian pulse train drives an intensity
modulator (IM) is placed in the laser cavity created by 5m or
erbium-doped fiber (EDF) and 10m of dispersion shifted
fiber (DSF). A tunable optical filter is used to tune the pulse
train wavelength in the C-band wavelength range. A 20MHz
pulse train is generated using the proposed active mode-
locked laser with pulse width about 12ns. The initial pulse
width used to drive the IM is 500ns. However, increasing the
repetition rate of the driving gaussian pulses to about 1GHz,
produces pulses with 12ps widths. The RF spectrum of the
generated pulses train of the proposed fiber laser showed
over 45dB, 62dB, 60dB, and 53dB signal to noise ratio
(SNR) for the 1st order, 5th order, 10th order and 40th order
repetition rate of the original gaussian pulses driving signal.
Experimental relegalization of the proposed design is
underway.
II. ACTIVE MODE-LOCKED LASER ARCHITECTURE AND
COMPONENTS PARAMETERS
Fig. 1 illustrates the block diagram of the proposed active
mode-locked fiber ring laser. The laser cavity is made of a
piece of 5m erbium-doped fiber and another piece of 10m
dispersion shifted fiber. The EDF piece is pumped using
50mW 980nm laser diode. An erbium concentration of
2u1024 m-3 in an Er doping radius of 2.2Pm is used for the
proposed laser. The DSF piece has dispersion of 3 ps/(km
nm), dispersion slope of 0.075 ps/nm2, effective area of 43

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Pm2 and a nonlinear refractive index of 3.2u10-20m2/W. The

pumped EDF provides a broadband noise seed in the C-band W
wavelength range that is necessary for the mode locking D
effect. An optical filter is also placed in the cavity to allow Pump M EDF DSF
tuning the wavelength of the laser generated pulse train. The source
TF controls the lasing wavelength within the emission 980 nm
spectrum of the EDF. An electrical Gaussian pulse generator
at a repetition rate of 20MHz drives an intensity modulator PG
that is placed inside the laser cavity. The electrical Gaussian
pulses initial width is 500ns. The DSF is used to message TF
the laser pulses and control their width. The ring laser FC
output is monitored by tapping the lasing signal through a
20% fiber coupler (FC). The generate pulse train of the laser IM OSA
is analyzed using an optical spectrum analyzer, RF spectrum
analyzer and oscilloscope. A pin detector is placed in front
of the RF spectrum analyzer to allow converting the laser RF Spectrum
Analyzer
optical signal to electrical signal.
III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION Oscilloscope
The proposed active mode-locked ring fiber laser design
is simulated using commercially available OptiSystem 15 Fig. 1. Active mode-locked ring fiber laser block diagram. EDF: erbium-
software. Fig. 2.a shows the initial noise seed spectrum doped fiber; DSF: dispersion shifted fiber; PG: pulse generator; IM:
produced by the EDF and used in the mode locking process. intensity modulator; TF: tunable filter; FC: fiber coupler.
The noise level is about -30dBm. The seed noise is passed
through the optical filter, modulated by the electrical
gaussian pulses in the intensity modulator, then amplified
(a)
again in the EDF and propagated through the DSF piece.
This process continues until mode-locking is achieved in the
ring. The software allows the numerical simulation of the
optical modulated signal to propagate in the laser ring cavity
as many times as required. The optical spectrum of the signal
at the output of the EDF piece after 400 iteration is shown in
Fig. 2.b. However, fifty iteration is sufficient to achieve
mode-locking for this proposed design.
The repletion rate of the electrical Gaussian pulses equals
the round-trip time of the laser cavity. Fig. 3.a shows the
generated laser pulse train measured at the output of the FC
using optical time domain visualizer. A 50ns interval
between the pulses is measured as shown in Fig. 3.b, which
corresponds to 20MHz pulse repetition rate. This rate
matches the cavity length. The laser generated pulses’ width
is about 12ns as depicted in Fig. 3.c. The proposed fiber laser (b)
showed high mode-locked state stability, where about 46dB
signal to noise ratio (SNR is measured using an RF spectrum
analyzer) as shown in Fig. 3.d. A pin detector is used to
convert the optical signal to electrical signal to allow using
RF spectrum analyzer. The optical spectrum of the generated
pulse train has a width of 0.11nm as shown in Fig. 4. The
simulated active mode-locked fiber has a very high
efficiency of about 41% as illustrated in Fig. 5 even if the
bitrate is increased to higher order 5th, 10th, and 40th. The
slope efficiency is calculated by measuring the generated
pulse train power by varying the 980nm pump laser power.
The output of the active mode-locked laser pulse train at
higher order driving signal rates is simulated for the same
cavity length as shown in Fig. 6. The electrical Gaussian 
pulses repetition rate is varied to the 5th, 10th and 40th orders.
An electrical bandpass filer with bandwidth of 0.1MHz is
used to clean up the noise generated in the fiber laser shown Fig. 2. Calculated optical spectrum (a) Seeds, (b) EDF output.
in Fig. 6. It is clear that the laser is stable and a pulse train
with pulse width as low as 30ps at repetition rate of 1GHz
can be generated using this proposed design.

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(a)

0.11nm

50ns (b)

Fig. 4 Measured mode-locked laser output optical pulse train spectrum.

200
41.37 %
output power (mW)

150

100

50
(c)
0
0 100 200 300 400 500
input Pump power (mW)

Fig. 5. Output power characteristics of mode locked laser .

11.78ns

CONCLUSION

Simple active mode-locked laser is proposed and

demonstrated using numerical simulation. The laser cavity is
created using 5m of EDF, 10m of DSF, tunable optical filter
(d) and an intensity modulator driven with an electrical gaussian
pulses at a rate of 20MHz. Higher order operation of the
laser is achieved, where a very stable pulse train with pulse
width as low as 30ps at repetition rate of 1GHz is achieved.
46dB

Fig. 3. (a) Mode-locked laser output pulse train. (b) Zooming of the
generated pulse train showing a period of 50ns. (c) Single pulse shape and
width. (d) Pulse train RF spectrum showing SNR about 46dB.

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5th order

62
dB

100MHz

5 ns
(b)

10th order

60
dB
200MHz

1.25ns
(c)

40th order

800MHz
53
dB

1ns

51 dB
1GHz
th
50 order

Fig. 6. Mode-locked laser output pulse train and its relative RF spectrum for (a) 5th order, (b) 10th order, (c) 40th order and (c) 50th order.

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