Experiments on Generation of Various Dark and Bright Pulses From an FM Mode-Locked Laser

We experimentally describe the generation of various dark and bright pulses from an FM mode-locked laser with, for example, Gaussian, secant hyperbolic (sech), double-sided exponential, rectangular, parabolic, triangular, Nyquist, and even tangent hyperbolic (tanh) shapes. The experiments were carried out by constructing a 20 GHz actively FM mode-locked erbium fiber laser. Since a continuous wave (CW) offset is needed to form a dark pulse, which can be considered the sum of a negative pulse and a rectangular pulse in one time slot. Therefore, a specific filter, which is installed in the laser cavity, consists of A(omega) , A(omega + n Omega(m)) with n = -infinity similar to +infinity and a sinc function spectrum that is newly introduced as a Fourier transformation of a rectangular pulse for describing the CW offset. Here, Omega(m) is the angular modulation frequency. We also generated a positive bright pulse that consists of a positive pulse with a positive CW offset. The generated optical pulses agreed well with the theory, where the spectral profiles even below -40 dB coincided well with the numerical profiles. We could also generate parabolic and triangular dark pulses in the intensity expression. Finally, we demonstrated tanh(t/T) pulse generation, which is an odd function and well known as a dark soliton solution of the nonlinear Schrodinger equation. This pulse was generated by changing the odd function into an even function by cascading positive and negative tanh(t/T) pulses at half the repetition rate.