In this paper, an all-fiber Brillouin laser ring cavity using a 3-m-long suspended-core chalcogenide As₃₈Se₆₂ fiber is reported for the first time to our knowledge. For a nonresonant ring cavity with no servo-locking, a laser threshold power of 37 mW and an efficiency of 26 % were obtained for a fiber having a core diameter of 5 μm. The linewidth of the Brillouin fiber laser and the pump laser were respectively measured to be below 4 kHz, the resolution of our autocorrelator, and 250 kHz, thus showing the linewidth-narrowing nature of the Brillouin laser. This result paves the way to compact Brillouin lasers with low threshold power and good spectral purity. A full experimental Brillouin characterization is also reported. We measured a Brillouin gain spectrum of 14.2 MHz, a Brillouin gain coefficient of 5.6x10^-9 m/W and a Brillouin frequency shift of 7.95 GHz in our fiber.

Date Published: 25 April 2012
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 8426, Microstructured and Specialty Optical Fibres, 842611 (25 April 2012); doi: 10.1117/12.921821

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8426:
Microstructured and Specialty Optical Fibres
Kyriacos Kalli; Alexis Mendez, Editor(s)