Thulium (Tm) based high repetition rate compact optical frequency comb sources operating in the 2 µm regime with femtosecond pulse durations enable a wide range of applications such as precise micro-machining, spectroscopy and metrology. Applications such as metrology and spectroscopy rely on the stability of mode-locked lasers (MLLs) which provide extreme precision, yet, the complex dynamics of such highly nonlinear systems result in unstable events which could hinder the normal operation of a MLL. MLL as a nonlinear system inherently exists a wide variety of complex attractors, which are sets of states that the system tends to evolve toward, exhibiting unique behaviors. Complex phenomena including pulsating solitons, chaotic solitons, period-doubling, soliton explosion, etc., have been predicted theoretically and observed experimentally in the past decade. However, most experimental observations rely on conventional characterization methods, which are limited to the scanning speed of the spectrometer and the electronic speed of photodetector and digitizer, so that the details of the non-repetitive events can be buried. In recent years, a technique called dispersive Fourier transform (DFT) has been developed and allows consecutive recordings of the pulse-to-pulse spectral evolution of a femtosecond pulse train, opening a whole new world of nonlinear dynamics in MLL.
In this dissertation, we first demonstrate the ability of scaling the repetition rate of a Tm MLL to repetition rate as high as 1.25 GHz through miniaturizing the cavity. Our approach of maintaining comparable pulse energies while scaling the repetition rates allows a high-quality femtosecond mode-locking performance with low noise performance in Tm soliton lasers. Then we experimentally study the transition dynamics between consecutive multi-pulsing states through adjusting pump power with a constant rate in an erbium-doped fiber laser, specifically the build-up and annihilation of soliton pulses between a double pulsing and a three-pulse state utilizing DFT.
To investigate real-time laser dynamics in Tm based laser systems, we propose and develop a DFT system that up-converts the signal to the 1 µm regime via second harmonics generation (SHG) and stretches the signal in a long spool of single-mode fiber to realize DFT. This approach overcomes the limitation of bandwidth of 2 µm photodetector and high intrinsic absorption of 2 µm light in fused silica fibers. The SHG-DFT system is used to study dynamics of both explosions in a chaotic state between stable single-pulsing and double-pulsing state, and explosions induced by soliton collision in a dual-wavelength vector soliton state. We also study dynamics of transient regimes in a Tm-doped fiber ring laser that can be switched between conventional soliton and dissipative soliton, revealing how spectral filtering plays a role in obtaining stable stationary states. / 2022-11-23T00:00:00Z
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/44772 |
| Date | 24 May 2022 |
| Creators | Zeng, Junjie |
| Contributors | Sander, Michelle Y. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ |
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