Actively mode-locked fiber laser with pulse intensity feed-forward

Abstract

We report a novel actively mode-locked fiber laser with a pulse intensity feed-forward path. In the novel scheme, the optical pulse is firstly converted to electrical signal, and then fed forward to a dual-drive Mach-Zehnder modulator, where the optical pulse is modulated by the intensity profile of itself. The laser is modulated by the 10-GHz sinusoidal signal, but by setting the sign of the feed-forward signal, the laser can work at totally different mode-locking regimes (10-GHz mode locking or fundamentally mode locking). So the feed-forward path in the cavity can be used for different functions, i.e., supermode noise suppression in 10-GHz mode locking and saturable absorption in fundamental mode-locking regime. Due to the simple synchronization to external clock and stable operation, many applications would benefit from the novel laser.