Asynchronous soliton mode locking.
We report a harmonically mode-locked erbium-doped fiber ring laser with short solitons. A phase modulator running asynchronously with the pulses provides pulse start-up, continuous background cleanup, and a new form of pulse timing stabilization. Steady-state operation of picosecond solitons at a repetition rate of 1 GHz was obtained with no need for modulator drive frequency stabilization.
Doerr
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Haus
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Ippen
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