title: Residual pump light as a probe of self-pulsing instability in an ytterbium-doped fiber laser.
abstract: Self-pulsing instability in the ytterbium-doped fiber (YDF) laser is investigated with the pump-bypassed cavity configuration. The residual pump light acts as a probe of the intracavity dynamics, and the temporal behavior of the light shows correlations with the self-mode locking instability in the original cavity and the sustained self-pulsing instability in the modified cavity of the YDF laser. The results suggest that the interactions among stimulated emission, pump absorption and/or reabsorption could account for self-pulsing instability in the YDF laser. The pump-bypassed laser cavity configuration can be used to investigate the instabilities of various kinds of fiber lasers.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Laser Science, University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, Japan. j_li@ils.uec.ac.jp
authors.forename: Jianlang
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Ken-ichi
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Ueda
authors.forename: Mitsuru
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Musha
authors.forename: Akira
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Shirakawa