Douglas W. Anthon

High power optical amplifiers for CATV applications

Optical power for analog/digital CATV is obtained from cladding pumped Yb,Er-doped fibre amplifiers where broad area laser diodes are free-space coupled through a hybrid isolator to an all-silica double clad gain fiber.

Passive FM laser operation and the stability of intracavity-doubled lasers.

A time-domain description of second-harmonic generation and steady-state spatial hole burning is used to model the performance of multimode intracavity-doubled lasers, avoiding some of the approximations implicit in rate equation models. Stable operation is predicted at the points of maximum power extraction, corresponding to passively locked FM laser operation, where the lack of amplitude modulation minimizes the nonlinear output coupling and the longitudinal-mode structure minimizes spatial hole burning. The laser intensity spectrum, predicted by this passive FM laser model, closely matches reported experimental results.