IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN QUANTUM ELECTRONICS, VOL. 15, NO.
2, MARCH/APRIL 2009
Actively Mode-Locked Fiber Optical
Parametric Oscillator
Sigang Yang, Yue Zhou, Jia Li, and Kenneth K.-Y. Wong, Member, IEEE
AbstractWe demonstrate active mode locking of a fiber optical
parametric oscillator (FOPO). By inserting an amplitude modula-
tor (AM) into a continuous-wave pumped FOPO loop, intracavity
loss is varied periodically. When the modulation frequency of AM
coincides with the harmonics of longitudinal modes spacing of the
loop cavity, stable 10-GHz pulse train can be obtained. By adjust-
ing the intracavity filter, the wavelength of the pulse train can be
tuned over 21 nm.
Index TermsMode-locked lasers, optical fibers, parametric
amplifiers, parametric oscillators.
I. INTRODUCTION
ARAMETRIC amplification in optical fibers is a poten-
P tially important mechanism for amplifying optical waves
for a variety of applications [1]. Due to the remarkable amplifi-
cation performance, fiber optical parametric amplifiers (FOPAs)
have attracted comprehensive interests in the past years [2][9].
Compared with the other popular fiber optical amplifiers, such as
erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) and Raman amplifiers
(RAs), FOPAs have demonstrated spectacular characteristics.
The gain bandwidth of FOPAs can increase with pump power.
This provides a means for making amplifiers with a bandwidth of
several hundred nanometers. Fiber OPAs with pulsed gain band-
widths ranging from 200 to 400 nm have been demonstrated in
recent years [5], [11]. Also, a 100-nm bandwidth was demon-
strated with a single continuous-wave (CW) pumped OPA using
a 4-W pump [12]. These experiments have shown that FOPAs
could provide a substantial bandwidth increase compared with
the traditional fiber amplifiers (EDFAs), which have gain band-
widths in the orders of tens of nanometers, limited by the mate-
rial properties. Moreover, a continuous gain of 70 dB in FOPA
has been reported [13]. It shows that FOPAs can exhibit gains
as large as or larger than that can be obtained with other types
of fiber amplifiers, such as EDFAs or RAs. To sum up, FOPAs
have potential to provide much larger gainbandwidth product
than EDFAs and RAs.
In principle, if an optical gain medium is available, one can
convert it into an oscillator by providing optical feedback to
Manuscript received October 17, 2008; revised December 5, 2008 and
December 16, 2008. Current version published April 8, 2009. This work was
supported by the grants from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong
Special Administrative Region, China, under Project HKU7172/07E and Project
HKU7179/08E.
The authors are with the Photonic Systems Research Laboratory, Depart-
ment of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Hong Kong,
Hong Kong (e-mail: sgyang@eee.hku.hk; yzhou@eee.hku.hk; jiali@eee.
hku.hk; kywong@eee.hku.hk).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JSTQE.2008.2011920
1077-260X/$25.00 2009 IEEE
393
form an optical resonator [14]. Based on EDFAs or semicon-
ductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) as the gain medium, fiber lasers
have been investigated comprehensively [15][18]. In the same
way, one can use the parametric gain for making a laser by
placing the fiber inside an optical cavity and pumping it with
a single pump source, which is called fiber optical parametric
oscillators (FOPOs) [19]. Benefitting from the extremely large
gain bandwidth of FOPA, FOPO can lase in potential regions
where practical lasers are currently not available. A number
of FOPOs have been demonstrated using standard and highly
nonlinear (HNL) dispersion-shifted optical fibers [20][27].
However, a primary difficulty with fiber OPO is that the cav-
ity length is typically many meters long, so that the frequency
spacing between the longitudinal modes is very small, typi-
cally in the order of megahertz. As a result, it is difficult to
make an intracavity optical filter to select and track a single
frequency. Consequently, multiple longitudinal mode oscillates
in optical cavity simultaneously [28], [29]. Under ordinary cir-
cumstances, phases of these multiple longitudinal modes have
random relationships, and, for CW oscillation beam, intensity
shows random time variation. To resolve this problem, many
kinds of mode locking techniques have been proposed in the
field of fiber lasers, and some of them can be utilized in FOPO.
Mode locking by synchronous pumping was proposed in FOPO
to produce short pulses [30]. It requires the modulation rate of
pump to be a precise harmonic of the fundamental frequency of
the optical cavity. These systems require the use of two optical
cavities with carefully matched repetition rates, thus increasing
the complexity. An alternative to these indirect and complex
schemes would be to generate short pulses directly by mode
locking an FOPO pumped by a CW laser, which is called ac-
tive mode locking. It can eliminate the need for an ultrafast
pulsed pump source and reduce the system complexity greatly.
However, in an early work, Becker et al. stated that mode lock-
ing an OPO was unlikely because there was no gain storage
in the nonlinear material [31]. Nevertheless, Melkonian et al.
later demonstrated that mode locking an OPO based on bulk
material was feasible [32], [33]. When the pump depletion is
negligible, there is a strong theoretical analogy between laser
and OPO mode locking. By using Haus formalism [34] origi-
nally developed for mode-locked lasers, it is possible to predict
that an actively mode-locked OPO may sustain oscillation of
100-ps-long pulses in the steady-state regime [33]. However, to
the best of our knowledge, this mode locking technique has not
yet been demonstrated in fiber OPO.
In this paper, we demonstrate, for the first time, active mode
locking of CW pumped fiber OPO. By inserting an amplitude
modulator (AM) in the FOPO cavity, which periodically varies
394 IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN QUANTUM ELECTRONICS, VOL. 15, NO. 2, MARCH/APRIL 2009
Fig. 1. Schematic diagram of mode locking in frequency domain.
the intracavity loss, stable 10-GHz pulse train will be produced
in the cavity when the modulating frequency is synchronized
with the FOPO cavity. By tuning the optical bandpass filter
in the cavity, the wavelength of the pulse train can be tuned
over nearly 21 nm. The remaining sections of this paper are
organized as follows. Section II introduces the principle of active
mode locking of FOPO. Section III presents the experimental
setup to investigate FOPO and active mode locking. Section IV
gives the experimental results of active mode locking of FOPO.
Concluding remarks will be presented in Section V.
II. PRINCIPLE OF ACTIVE MODE LOCKING
A typical fiber OPO configuration is the all-fiber OPO ring
resonator. The pump light can be injected into the resonator
either through a coupler or through an auxiliary wavelength
division multiplexing (WDM) coupler placed in the loop. The
resonant frequencies can be obtained by imposing the condition
that the total phase shift along the ring path must equal an
integral number of 2. The spacing between two consecutive
frequencies is
c is to realize stable fiber OPO pumped by CW first. Usually, the
dv =
nL
where c is the speed of light in vacuum, n is the equivalent
refractive index of the ring, and L is the cavity length.
If the initial phases of the multiple longitudinal modes can
have fixed values so that the spectral phase difference of two con-
secutive modes is constant, the superimposed intensity would
behave as a pulse train in time domain, instead of the random
noise [14]. This is what the mode locking will function as. In
active mode locking FOPO, the modulation frequency applied
to AM is integral times of the longitudinal modes spacing. The
AM produces sidebands to each of the oscillating longitudinal
modes at the longitudinal mode spacing. The sidebands have
fixed spectral phase difference. Furthermore, the sidebands are
modulated with the same frequency by AM and higher order
sidebands will be produced, as shown in Fig. 1. Finally, the
spectral phases l of the longitudinal modes in the output beam
is locked according to the relation
l l1 =
where is constant. The modulator transfers energy from each
mode to its neighboring mode, thereby redistributing energy
from the center to the wings of the spectrum. This process seeds
and injection-locks neighboring modes.
Fig. 2. Schematic diagram of mode locking in time domain.
In the time domain, the cavity loss is periodically modu-
lated with a modulation frequency exactly matched to the cavity
round-trip time. Thus, two consecutive pulses of the output beam
are separated by a time that is just the cavity round-trip time.
And the extent of typical mode-locked pulses is usually much
shorter than the cavity length. The oscillating behavior inside
the OPO cavity can therefore be visualized as consisting of a
single short pulse. A pulse can then build up synchronously with
the exerted modulation, where the pulse will be centered in the
middle of the modulation function and is successively shortened
in each round-trip, as shown in Fig. 2.
III. EXPERIMENTAL SETUP
The key step to investigate actively mode-locked fiber OPO
length of ring cavity is ranged from several meters to as long as
kilometers. OPA is very sensitive to the fluctuation of the fiber
dispersion. Even the longitudinal nonuniformity of chromatic
dispersion in gain fiber would lead to deterioration of the OPA
gain. Hence, in the previously reported pulsed OPOs, short-gain
fiber was used [35]. However, in order to obtain enough gain
with CW pump, a tradeoff between the quality and the value of
OPA gain must be considered. Here, 400-m HNL dispersion-
shifted fiber (HNL-DSF) was used to provide enough gain value
with moderate pump power.
The specifications of the HNL-DSF are shown in Table I. Its
nonlinear coefficient was 14 W1 km1 and its zero dispersion
wavelength was 1554 nm. The OPA worked in its anomalous
dispersion region, as the pump wavelength was 1556 nm. We
used amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) from EDFA as the
seed source and inferred the OPA gain spectrum from the mea-
surement of the output ASE spectrum after FOPA similar to
some other research efforts had been pursued before [5]. It
demonstrated that with CW pump at 1556 nm, the HNL-DSF
had relatively flat gain curve around 1575 nm.
For the safety of the devices, a critical consideration was that
the high-power pump should be restricted in the span of the
gain medium and would not propagate to the rest of the cavity.
YANG et al.: ACTIVELY MODE-LOCKED FIBER OPTICAL PARAMETRIC OSCILLATOR
TABLE I
SPECIFICATIONS OF HNL-DSF
Fig. 3. Schematic diagram of CW pumped FOPO.
So we adopted a configuration as shown in Fig. 3 to meet this
requirement.
The pump source was an external cavity tunable laser source
(TLS). High power input to the HNL-DSF would readily cause
serious stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS). To suppress SBS,
the light was first phase-modulated with 10-Gb/s pseudorandom
bit sequence (PRBS) signal via a phase modulator (PM). A
polarization controller (PC1) aligned the pumps state of
polarization (SOP) with the transmission axis of the PM and
it was critical to maximize the suppression of SBS. The SBS
could be suppressed by up to 32 dB using this method. Then, the
pump was amplified by a cascaded two-stage configuration of
EDFA. The first stage of EDFA (EDFA1) provided small signal
gain to prevent self-saturation by ASE. Then, it was filtered by a
0.35-nm bandwidth tunable bandpass filter (TBPF1) to reduce
ASE noise. It was further amplified by the second stage of
EDFA, with a maximum average output power of 33 dBm.
Due to the limited power budget, we could not insert an isolator
after the output of EDFA2 so as to isolate the reflection. The
effectiveness of SBS suppression was demonstrated at the
beginning of the experiment. Then, the pump was coupled into
HNL-DSF via C port of a C/L band WDM coupler (WDMC1).
The high-power pump light propagated through the HNL-DSF
and then was coupled out of the ring cavity to C port of the
other C/L band WDM coupler (WDMC2). The amplified
395
Fig. 4. Spectrum of the FOPO. The solid line indicates the spectrum with
filter in cavity and the dashed line is the one without filter in the cavity.
signal was coupled into the ring cavity through the L port
of WDM coupler (WDMC2). A 10/90 optical coupler was
inserted after WDMC2 to couple out 10% of signal light to
act as the output of the FOPO. TBPF2 with the bandwidth of
0.35 nm was inserted into the cavity to tune the oscillating
central wavelength and restrict the working bandwidth of OPO.
TBPF2 was placed behind the 10/90 coupler so that both the os-
cillating wavelength and noise can be detected from the output.
Thus, it was convenient to determine if the threshold condition
of FOPO had been satisfied or not. The isolator (ISO1) provided
unidirectional operation and prevented oscillating by way of
backreflection. PC2 was used to align the signals SOP with
the pump so as to maximize the signal gain. The output signal
was then divided into two equal parts through a 50/50 coupler.
The two parts of the output light were then sent to an optical
spectrum analyzer (OSA) and a power meter, respectively.
Fig. 4 shows the spectrum observed from the OSA with
1 nm resolution. The solid line was the observed spectrum with
the filter inserted in the cavity and the dashed line was the one
without filter introduced, with pump power of 1 and 0.78 W,
respectively. Isolation between C and L ports of WDMC2 was
20 dB. So small portion of light in C band could still be ob-
served in the OSA. When the filter was not inserted, due to
the ability of mode selection from the ring cavity, coarse peaks
could also be observed around 1569 nm and other higher order
FWM terms. Note that the peaks were not stable when chang-
ing the pump power. The coarse peak at 1569 nm was inclined
to shift to longer wavelength when the pump power increased
above the threshold without an intracavity filter, possibly due
to the shift of OPA gain peak to the longer wavelength. Once
the intracavity filter was introduced, and the pump power ex-
ceeded the threshold power of 0.9 W, sharp peak appeared at
1569.1 nm. It indicated that optical resonance was established.
Also the higher order FWM terms could be observed in L band.
The narrow-band peak at 1569.1 nm included multiple longitu-
dinal modes spaced by about 0.5 MHz.
Then, an AM was inserted in the cavity, as demonstrated in
Fig. 5. In order to obtain clean signal, the intracavity filter was
396 IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN QUANTUM ELECTRONICS, VOL. 15, NO. 2, MARCH/APRIL 2009
Fig. 5. Schematic diagram of actively mode-locked FOPO.
placed immediately after WDMC2. A LiNbO3 MachZehnder
AM (MZI-AM) driven by a signal generator was inserted after
the filter. Due to the polarization dependence of the LiNbO3
modulator, a PC2 was employed to adjust the SOP of the pulses.
A tunable optical delay line (ODL), ranging from 0 to 350 ps,
was used to adjust the cavity length. A digital communication
analyzer (DCA) with 34 GHz bandwidth was used to detect the
signal at one output of the 50/50 optical coupler. The modulation
frequency of the AM was roughly multiple of the ring mode
spacing. Adjustment of the delay line set the round-trip time in
the ring equal to an integral number of modulation periods.
IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
The central transmission wavelength of TBPF2 was set to be
1569.03 nm. The total loss of the ring cavity was measured to
be 18.3 dB. The cavity loss mainly came from the tunable filter
(TBPF2) and the AM, both with about 5 dB. The large intracav-
ity loss was a real challenge to establish parametric oscillating.
Only if the gain experienced by the pulses in the cavity ex-
ceeded the loss, the cavity could oscillate. The frequency of the
microwave signal driving the AM was chosen to be 10 GHz. By
tuning the optical delay line, when the output power of EDFA2
was larger than 1.52 W, stable pulse train could be observed
from the DCA.
Fig. 6 shows the repeated scan of the waveform of actively
mode-locked pulse train when 10 GHz sinusoidal signal was
applied to the modulator. The pulsewidth measured from the
DCA was 24 ps and the jitter rms was only 0.5 ps, which was
inherited from the signal generator (synthesizer). The output
power measured from 10% port of the coupler was 0 dBm.
Fig. 7 shows the optical spectrum of the pulse train and the
corresponding spectrum in CW regime with 0.01 nm resolution.
The wavelength where the peak was located was 1569.03 nm.
The lasing wavelength had more than 45 dB suppression
over other nonlasing modes. The full-width at half-maximum
(FWHM) bandwidth was 0.25 nm. In the mode locking spec-
trum, a frequency comb could be observed compared with the
Fig. 6. Pulse train generated from the actively mode-locked fiber OPO.
Fig. 7. Spectrum of pulse train generated from the actively mode-locked fiber
OPO and the corresponding spectrum in CW regime.
CW one. The frequency comb included the longitudinal modes
with separation of 0.08 nm, which corresponded to the 10 GHz
repetition rate of the pulse train. The RF spectrum of the de-
tected pulses is shown in Fig. 8. The RF spectrum was measured
using a photodetector with 3 dB bandwidth of 20 GHz and an
electric spectrum analyzer (ESA) with 10 dB attenuation. The
RF spectrum at the modulation frequency shows that the side
modes were well suppressed. However, because of the 10-Gb/s
PRBS necessary to suppress SBS, we see a very high noise floor
from phase-to-intensity conversion through fiber group veloc-
ity dispersion. The wavelength of pulse train could be tuned
simply by adjusting the transmission wavelength of the cavity
filter TBPF2. When the transmission wavelength of the tunable
filter was tuned, the optical delay line should be adjusted cor-
respondingly so as to satisfy the harmonics mode locking con-
dition. Fig. 9 shows optical spectra tuned at 1566.57, 1569.03,
1575.182, 1580.79, and 1587.15 nm (shown as a, b, c, d, and
e), respectively. The OPA gain was largest around wavelength
1575 nm, but became smaller when the wavelength was tuned
far away from 1575 nm. As long as the gain was larger than the
cavity loss, the pulse train could still be obtained. For example,
YANG et al.: ACTIVELY MODE-LOCKED FIBER OPTICAL PARAMETRIC OSCILLATOR 397

Fig. 8. Measured RF spectrum of output pulses.

Fig. 10. Output power of FOPO versus wavelength.

In principle, wideband tunable actively mode-locked FOPO

can be achieved. By utilizing the ultra-wideband tunable range
of FOPO, we can use only a single-pump wavelength to produce
pulse train tuned in wideband range.

V. CONCLUSION
In conclusion, we have proposed and demonstrated an ac-
tively mode-locked fiber OPO. By inserting an AM into the
OPO ring cavity, the loss of the light in the cavity was mod-
ulated periodically. When the modulation frequency coincided
with the harmonics of the longitudinal modes spacing of the
ring, stable 10-GHz pulse train could be produced. By tuning
the optical bandpass filter in the cavity, the wavelength of the
pulse train could be tuned over nearly 21 nm.

for providing HNL-DSF.
Fig. 9. Tunable characteristics of mode-locked FOPO.
when the oscillating wavelength was tuned to be 1566.57 nm,
stable pulse train could still be observed. However, due to the
decrease of net gain, the amplitude of pulse train was smaller
than that at 1569.03 nm.
The same case also occurred when the transmission wave-
length of the filter TBPF2 was tuned to 1587.15 nm. Therefore,
the fiber OPO could be tuned over nearly 21 nm range from
1566.57 to 1587.15 nm.
Fig. 10 shows the output power of the pulse train at five dif-
ferent wavelengths of 1566.57, 1569.03, 1575.182, 1580.79,
and 1587.15 nm. The FOPO had largest output power at
1575.182 nm, corresponding to the OPA gain peak, while the
output power decreased when the wavelength was tuned away
from 1575.182 nm. The evolution of pulses power versus wave-
length agreed well with the OPA gain spectrum of the HNL-DSF.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank Sumitomo Electric Industries
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Sigang Yang received the B.E. degree in mate-
rial from Northeastern University, Shenyang, China,
in 2000, the M.S. degree in physical electronics
from Huazhong University of Science and Technol-
ogy, Wuhan, China, in 2003, and the Ph.D. degree
in electronic engineering from Tsinghua University,
Beijing, China, in 2008.
He is currently with the Photonic Systems
Research Laboratory, Department of Electrical
and Electronic Engineering, The University of
Hong Kong, Hong Kong. His past research interests
include photonic crystal fibers and slow light. His current research interests
include fiber optical parametric amplification and oscillators.
Yue Zhou received the B.Eng. degree in electronic
engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University,
Shanghai, China, in 2008. He is currently working
toward the M.Phil. degree at the Department of Elec-
trical and Electronic Engineering, The University of
Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
His current research interests include fiber optical
parametric amplifiers and oscillators.
Jia Li received the B.S. degree in optical informa-
tion science and technology from Huazhong Univer-
sity of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China, in
2007. He is currently working toward the M.Phil. de-
gree in electronic engineering at The University of
Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
His current research interests include applications
of fiber optical parametric amplifier, oscillator in op-
tical, and microwave communication systems.
Kenneth K.-Y. Wong (S00M03) received the
combined B.E. (first class honors with medal award)
degree in electrical engineering and the B.S. de-
gree in physics from the University of Queensland,
Brisbane, Australia, in 1997, and the M.S. and Ph.D.
degrees from Stanford University, Stanford, CA,
in 1998 and 2003, respectively, both in electrical
engineering.
He was a member of the Photonics and Net-
working Research Laboratory, Stanford University.
From 1998 to 1999, he was a Research Engineer with
HewlettPackard Laboratories and contributed in projects that included parallel
optics and vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL). In 2004, he was also
an Independent Consultant with Innovation CORE (a Sumitomo Electric Com-
pany). He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical
and Electronic Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. He has
authored or coauthored more than 50 journals and conference papers. His past
research interests include dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM)
systems, subcarrier multiplexed (SCM) optical systems, fiber nonlinearity, fiber
optical parametric amplifiers, and photonic crystal fibers. He is the Reviewer
for Optics Letters, Journal of the Optical Society of America B, Optical Physics,
Optics Express, IEE Electronics Letters, and Optics Communications.
Dr. Wong is a member of The International Society for Optical Engineers
(SPIE) and the IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optic Society (LEOS). He was the
recipient of the Optical Society of America (OSA) New Focus Student Award
and the IEEE/Lasers and Electro-Optics (LEOS) Graduate Student Fellowship,
both in 2003. He was also the recipient of the Best Teacher Award in 2005
2006 from The University of Hong Kong. He is the Reviewer for the IEEE
PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS and the IEEE/OSA JOURNAL OF LIGHT-
WAVE TECHNOLOGY.