Bidirectional optical bistability in a dual-pumped erbium doped fiber ring laser

We investigate bidirectional optical wave propagations in a dual-pumped erbium doped fiber ring laser without isolator, and observe optical bistabillity behaviors. Consequently, we propose and construct a NOLM-NALM fiber ring laser to demonstrate and exploit this bidirectional optical bistability phenomenon in optical switching by introducing two tunable variable ratio couplers in the system. Numerical analyses based on the proposed laser structure have also been demonstrated corroborated with the experimental results. (C) 2004 Optical Society of America.