Abstract

It has recently been shown that fiber ring lasers can be mode-locked by streams of optical pulses.¹ In such lasers, the driving pulses propagate along a length of optical fiber that forms part of the ring laser cavity, causing a periodic phase modulation of the cavity through cross-phase modulation. If the repetition rate of the driving pulse stream is an integer multipie of the cavity frequency, mode-locking occurs and the laser generates a stream of pulses at the repetition rate of the driving stream. If driven by a data stream, the laser still generates a continuous stream of pulses²—this clock recovery function was used in the recent demonstration of all-optical regeneration.³

© 1994 Optical Society of America