Passively Stabilized Doubly-Resonant Brillouin Fiber Lasers

We consider ultra narrow-line lasers based on doubly-resonant fiber cavities, describe experimental techniques, and present two methods for passive stabilization of single-frequency fiber Brillouin lasers. In the first approach, Brillouin fiber laser is passively stabilized at the pump resonance frequency by employing the self-injection locking phenomenon. We have demonstrated that this locking phenomenon delivers a significant narrowing of the pump laser linewidth and generates the Stokes wave with linewidth of about 0.5 kHz. In the second methodology, the fiber laser is stabilized with an adaptive dynamical grating self-organized in un-pumped Er-doped optical fiber. The laser radiates a single-frequency Stokes wave with a linewidth narrower than 100 Hz. The ring resonators of both presented lasers are simultaneously resonant for the pump and the Stokes radiations. For adjusting the double resonance at any preselected pump laser wavelength, we offer a procedure that provides a good accuracy of the final resonance peak location with ordinary measurement and cutting errors. The stable regime for both Brillouin lasers is observed during some intervals, which are interrupted by short-time jumping-intervals. The lasers’ stability can be improved by utilizing polarization-maintaining (PM) fiber configuration and a cavity protection system

Fiber Laser for Phase-Sensitive Optical Time-Domain Reflectometry

We have designed a new fiber laser configuration with an injection-locked DFB laser applicable for phase-sensitive optical time-domain reflectometry. A low-loss fiber optical ring resonator (FORR) is used as a high finesse filter for the self-injection locking of the DFB (IL-DFB) laser. By varying the FORR fidelity, we have compared the DFB laser locking with FORR operating in the under-coupled, critically coupled, and over-coupled regimes. The critical coupling provides better frequency locking and superior narrowing of the laser linewidth. We have demonstrated that the locked DFB laser generates a single-frequency radiation with a linewidth less than 2.5 kHz if the FORR operates in the critically coupled regime. We have employed new IL-DFB laser configuration operating in the critical coupling regime for detection and localization of the perturbations in phase-sensitive OTDR system. The locked DFB laser with a narrow linewidth provides reliable long-distance monitoring of the perturbations measured through the moving differential processing algorithm. The IL-DFB laser delivers accurate localization of the vibrations with a frequency as low as ~50 Hz at a distance of 9270 m providing the same signal-to-noise ratio that is achievable with an expensive ultra-narrow linewidth OEwaves laser (OE4020–155000-PA-00)