Eckhaus Instability in Laser Cavities With Harmonically Swept Filters

In this paper, we report the existence of Eckhaus instability in laser cavities with harmonically swept filters, of which Fourier Domain Mode Locked (FDML) laser is an important example. We show that such laser cavities can be modeled by a real Ginzburg Landau equation with a frequency shifting term...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of lightwave technology 2021-10, Vol.39 (20), p.6531-6538
Main Authors: Li, Feng, Huang, Dongmei, Nakkeeran, K., Kutz, J. Nathan, Yuan, Jinhui, Wai, P. K. A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Dispersion
Eckhaus instability
Fourier domain mode locking
Frequency shift
High frequency
Holes
Landau-Ginzburg equations
Laser cavities
Laser mode locking
Laser outputs
Laser stability
Laser theory
Lasers
Mathematical model
real Ginzburg Landau equation
Signal quality
Stability
Stability analysis
swept laser
Time-frequency analysis
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Summary:In this paper, we report the existence of Eckhaus instability in laser cavities with harmonically swept filters, of which Fourier Domain Mode Locked (FDML) laser is an important example. We show that such laser cavities can be modeled by a real Ginzburg Landau equation with a frequency shifting term arisen from the cavity dispersion. We analytically derived a solution of the governing equation and analyzed its stability. We found that the cavity dispersion introduces a continuous frequency shift to the laser signal such that it will be eventually pushed outside the stable region and trigger the Eckhaus instability. We show that the repeated triggering of the Eckhaus instability in the laser cavities is the dominant effect that leads to the high frequency fluctuations in FDML laser output, which is the unique feature of such laser cavities and intrinsically limits the signal quality of the FDML lasers with nonzero cavity dispersion.
ISSN:0733-8724
1558-2213
DOI:10.1109/JLT.2021.3104186