Characterization and modeling of a dispersive cavity mode-locked erbium-doped fiber laser

A novel, compact, polarization insensitive mode-locked erbium-doped fiber laser producing 2 ps pulses was constructed. The laser was passively mode-locked using a 75 period InGaAs/InAlAs multiple quantum well (MQW) saturable absorber grown lattice matched on an InP substrate. The laser was constructed in a linear cavity, Fabry-Perot configuration with the saturable absorber at one end of the cavity and a chirped fiber Bragg grating at the other end. The output pulses are chirped and were further characterized by varying their energies and propagating them down different lengths of standard optical fiber. The laser cavity was modeled using the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation derived under the condition that nonlinear changes to the pulse must be small per round-trip. The contribution of the semiconductor saturable absorber was modeled using a two-level rate equation. The free carrier absorption within the semiconductor contributes to the refractive index which was shown numerically to result in an additional frequency shift. The modeling is in close agreement with the pulse propagation experiments.