Estimation of timing jitter in a passively mode-locked tunable fiber laser

Abstract

The tunable fiber lasers in the soliton regime are attractive ultrashort optical pulse sources. However, problems arise with fiber lasers due to their susceptibility to mechanical and temperature fluctuations affecting the optical path length of the cavities. The resulting instabilities are the major barriers for their applications in communications. The estimations of phase noise properties are important with respect to applications of the sources. Timing jitter is a type of phase noise that can occur in a short time scale. The jitter is consistent with small variations of optical path length in the cavity. We have demonstrated a passively mode-locked erbium-doped fiber laser to generate 60 nm tunable 270 fs pulses with 45.4 MHz repetition frequency. We describe the estimation of timing jitter in this fiber laser.