Wuhan University Journal of Natural Sciences Vol. 4 No. 4 1 9 9 9 .

4 3 5 ~ 4 3 8

Article ID: 1007-1202(1999)04-0435-04

1.55 Wavelength Operation of

E3+-Doped Optical Fiber Bistability"
S O N G Q i a n ~, Z H A N G Yuan-cheng 2
l. College of Electronics Information. W u h a n University, Wuhan 430072. China
2. Department of Physics. W u h a n University. Wuhan 430072, China

Abstract : An all-optical all-fiber optical bistability operation has been realized in an all-fiber cavity consist-
ed with Er-doped fiber and optical fiber-loop mirrors. The experimental bistability threshold is consistent
with the theory.
Key words: optical nonlinearity; optical bistability; Er-doped fiber; all*fiber device
CLC number : O 437 Document code : A

0 Introduction
As is well known, optical bistability device
(OBD) is a broad applicable device with flexbility.
It may be used for severial optical signal processing
functions such as optical amplification, wave re-
shaping, regeneration, and etc [1-42. Recently, as a
nonlinear optical material, optical fiber is more and
more noteceable. Using optical fiber as the optical
medium of OBD, the necessary threshold optical
power may be low owing to its extra thin and long
geometry.
Fiber optical bistability (FOB)operated firstly
in 1983ES3,but the threshold power is in the magi-
tude order of 100 W in order that common optical
fiber and a couple of bulk optical mirrors are used
in the experiment. It is known that the Kerr coeffi-
cient n2 of Er-doped optical fiber is higher in 4
magnitude orders then common fiber at 514.5 nm
wavelength of Ar-laser~6i,so the threshold power
must be low correspondingly;besides,owing to the
well known resonance enhancement effect ,the opti-
cal nonlinearity of Er-doped fiber at 1.55 ,um wave-
length must be higher because this wavelength is
just the most absorption peak of Er-ion. So that
the threshold of an Er-doped FOBD may reach the
level that is used in an optical communication sys-
tern.
Severial kinds of all-fiber optical cavity with
Er-doped fiber have been proposed and studied c73,
all of their threshold powers may be less than a
milliwatt. In this letter, a 1.55/~m wavelength op-
eration of Er-doped FOB using optical loolDmirrors
is reported.
An accompanied pulse compression with
wave-reshaping can be relized simultaneouslyE83
when an OBD amplifies an optical digital signal.
Certainly this effect is most interesting for optical
fiber communications: amplitude amplification
compensates for the attenuation due to fiber ab-
sorption, while pulse compression and wave-re-
shaping eliminate the pulse broadening and distor-
tion caused by the fiber dispersion, i. e., the
OBD' s amplification is naturely a digital signal am-
plification. Here the fiber OBD is an all-fiber de-
vice furthermore, so it is possible to expect that
some kind of "quasi-one-dimentional"(along fiber)
integrate optical device, which integrete all-fiber
laser, OBD amplifier, OBD regenerator, and etc.
on a segment of optical fiber to genarate, amplify,
reshape, and regenerate an optical digital signal in
very high speed and large capacity, without any
low-speed electrical intermediate processing. In
other words, this is a really all-optical communica-

Received date: 199!I 05-12

* Foundation item: Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(69487007)
Biography:SONC; Qian (1937).female. Professor. Research direction :nonlinear optics and all-optical communication.
 436 Wuhan University Journal o f Natural Sciences Vol. 4

tion system with an all-optical all-fiber direct re- E(1 - - 2 k z ) z ( 1 - - 7 z ) z] (9)

peater. Icu(z) =4IT(1 - k z ) k z e x p [ - - a ( z - L ) ] /
(1 - - 2 k z ) z (10)
I Principle where the Eqs. ( t ) . ( 2 ) have been used.
FM~ FM2

Fig. 1 is an all-fiber optical cavity consisted of

a couple of fiber loop mirrors and a segment of Er-
doped optical fiber with length L. The fiber loop
mirror F M , ( i = 1,2) is made of an optical direc- kl
|
Yl k2
i
)'2
..

tional coupler and a short segment of optical fiber. o L Z

Let the coupling coefficient, loss excess, and the
length of the fiber of the ith mirror are respectively
ki,)'i and l , The intensity reflectivity and trans-
mittance are [73 :
Ri = 4k, ( 1 - ki ) (1 - 7~) Zexp( -- 2eli)
for i = 1,2 (1)
Ti = (1 - 2k,)2(1 - Y/)%xp(- 2eli)
for i = 1,2 (2)
respectively, where a is the amplitude absorptive
coefficient of the fiber.
As a Fabry-Perot optical cavity with bulk op-
tical mirrors, this fiber-loop mirror cavity (FMC)
is a standing-wave resonance cavity, and has a
similar modulation characterastic:
TM(~P) ~ Ir/I1 -= To/{1 + Fsin2[(r - n)/2]}
= 2pL (3)
where I1,I-r and ~ are the input and transmissive
intensity, and the round-trip phase shift of the
cavity respectively. Here rt is corresponding to the
phase lag undergone in the two fiber couplers. The
peak transmittance To and fineness factor F of the
cavity are
To = T l T 2 e x p ( - 2eL)~(1 - R ) 2 (4)
F = 4R/(1 -- R) 2 (5)
where R is effective refrectivety of the cavity mir-
rors :
R = (RiRz)l/Zexp( - 2eL) (6)
Let z be the coordinate along the Er-doped
fiber as shown in Fig. 1. Noting the second fiber-
loop mirror F M z ( z = L ) , for the forward and back-
ward travelling waves L ~ ( z ) and Icb(z) in the cavi-
ty we have
Ia(L) =IT/T 2 (7)
Icb(L) = I c f ( L ) R 2 (8)
Thus the two travelling wave in the fiber cavi-
ty are
I a ( z ) = IT exp[-2a(L + lz -- z ) ] /
9
Fig. l OBI) with fiber mirror cavity
Under nonlinear condition, the nonlinear
phase shift at a little segment dz of the Er-doped
fiber is
d~L = ( 2 n / X ) n z I r (11)
where nz is the Kerr coefficient of the core of the
Er-doped fiber, ,~ is the wavelength of the light
source, and
I t ( z ) = Icf(z) + Icb(Z) (12)
is the total intensity in the cavity.
The Er-doped fiber used in the experiment is
made by the Optical Fiber Section, Wuhan Re-
search Institute of Posts and Telecom, the MPT of
China. Its intensity absorptive coefficient is
2a=1.06 dB/m and may be regards as a constant
in the experimental conditions in accordance with
our experimental measurment. An integretion of
Eq. (11) from z = 0 to z = L introduces a total non-
linear phase shift in the cavity
7~L =-~0-- % = 2(2nnz/2)
f,o
[Ir + Ir
= 2 n n z l x [ e x p ( 2 a L ) -- 13(1 + R z ) / ( a a T 2 )
(13)
where the nonlinear phase shift and loss in the two
short segments of fiber in FMz are neglected. In
Eq. (13)
% = (M2n)noL (14)
is initial (low intensity) phase shift and no is re-
frective index of the core of the Er-doped fiber at
low intensity.
A feedback charecteristic
Tr(~) = Ir/I1 = K ( ~ o - ~ ) (15)
may be obtained from Eq. (13), where
K = 2 a T z e x p ( - 2aL)/{27rnz[1 - e x p ( - 2aL)]
(1 + Rz)I1} (16)
The feedback characteristic[-Eq. (15)3 is a
cluster of stright line shot from the initial phase
point with a slope K which is inversely propertion-
 No. 4 S()NG Qian et al: 1.55 ,um Wavelength Operation of'..
al to the input intensity I~.
The nonlinear all-fiber optical cavity is de-
scribed by the modulation characteristic [Eq. (3)]
and the feedback characteristic simultaneously.
i . e . , the steady states in the system are decided by
all the intersection points of the two characteris-
tics. From this there is no difficulty to understand
the formation of bistability hysteresis. The mini-
mum threshold intensity Lh,, is corresponding to
the maximum slope Km of the modulation charac-
teristic.
lthm = 2 a T 2 e x p ( - 2ag)/{2~n211 - exp(-- 2ag)]
X (1 + Re)K,,} (17)
It is easy to know
K m = ToF[X(1 - X)]~/z/(1 ~- F X ) 2 (18)
with
X = sin2G,
= {(3F + 2) - [(31: ~ 2) z -- 8F]~/2}/(4F)
(19)
is the coordinlate of the point where the second
differential of modulation characteristic is zero.
2 Experiment
On the basis of our prior experimental works
on OBD '--8-112 an Er-doped fiber optical bistability
experiment has been completed. The experiment
setup is shown in Fig. 2. The FMC is an asymmet-
ric cavity with mirror parameters Rt = 0. 77,
T I = 0 . 18,R2--0. 87 and 2"2=0.08. It is construct-
ed from 0.80 m single-mode Er-doped fiber F and
two fiber-loop mirrors whose fiber directional cou-
plers were fabricated by Wuhan Research Institute
of Posts and Telecom, the MPT of China. The Er-
doped fiber in the cavity coils several times around
each of two perpendicular piezoelectrical cylinders
whose ends have been plated with electrodes to
form a piezoelectrical transducer PT, so that a
variable direct current voltage may be apply across
the electrodes to change the length I. of the Er-
doped fiber in the cavity and fine tune the initial
phase shift ~ of Eq. (14), then some hysteresises
with different width can be obtained, tt is abvious
that an one-wavelength-variety of L is just enough
to change % over 27r.
In Fig. 2, S is the source. It is a multiple
quantum well ( M Q W ) distribution feedback
437
(DFB) single-mode semiconductor laser made by
the Semiconductor Institute of Chinese Academy of
Sciences, and has a central wavelength 1 552.6 nm
at 20 C and linewidth 10 MHz, ISO is a fiber isola-
tor. In order to observate hysteresises of the cavity
H~C
@
t'i~. 2 Experimental setup
it is necessary that the intensity of the input beam
must change between 0 to a value beyond the
threshold. Thus an electrical triangle wave genera-
tor TWG is used as a driven source to modulate the
intensity. This modulated beam is then splited into
two beams by a Y-type fiber coupler C. The
stronger one is coupled into the FMC cavity as the
input light of the cavity; the weaker one is fed to a
photoelectrical detector D1 to transform into an
electrical signal. It is propertional to the input in-
tensity and sent to X input terminal of a KIKUSUI
5021 double-trace oscillascope OSC as a scanning
signal horizontally. The output optical signal from
the nonlinear FMC cavity is sent to another detec-
tor Dz. After amplification by an amplifier A this
electical signal, which is propertional to the trans-
missive intensity of the cavity, is fed to the Y input
terminal of the oscillascope OSC. Adjusting the di-
rect current voltage to set some diffirent initial
phase %, some experimental hysteresises with dif-
ferent width and different threshold powers can be
obtained. Four experimental oscillascope pho-
tographs are shown in Fig. 3. They are corre-
sponding to bistability threshold powers 0.08, 0.
12, 0.17 and 0.21 mW respectively.
The calculated minimum threshold power for
this device is 0. 12 mW according to Ref. [7] where
nz value at 514. 5 nm as in Ref. [ 6 ] is used .
Threshold of any hysteresis with nonvanished
width is appropriately larger than this minimum ,so
the above observational results show that n2 value
in our experiment is more than that in Ref. [6] and
accords with our measurment result in Ref. [12].
An obvious resonance enhancement effect may be
 438 Wuhan University ,lournal o f Natural Sciences
due to the fact that the wavelength 1 552.6 nm of
the light source is near the absorptive peak wave-
length 1 560. 0 nm of the Er-doped fiber used in
the experiment.
3 Conclusion
Er-doped fiber optical bistability has been re-
Fig. 3 Expertmental oscilloscope photographs
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