Abstract

Passively-mode-locked fiber ring lasers are an attractive source of picosecond and subpicosecond solitonlike pulses. In these lasers the basic dynamical balance that leads to passive mode locking of the individual pulses is due to a slow-saturable gain provided by erbium-doped optical amplifiers, a fast-saturable absorption provided by nonlinear polarization rotation and polarization-selective elements, and a frequency filter that is provided by frequency-dependent cavity resonances combined with the saturable absorber. These elements lead to no interpulse interactions, so that when the laser cavity contains many pulses, one finds that they are free to move about with respect to one another, leaciing in most cases to rich and complex dynamics.¹ However, recent experiments show that in some cases the pulses are all regularly spaced, indicating the presense of an interpulse interaction.² Not only is this result physically interesting, but it also has implications for potential applications that require regular pulse spacing.

© 1995 Optical Society of America