Experimental study of lasing characteristics of Brillouin/erbium optical fiber laser

A lasing charactrization of a Brillouin/erbium optical fiber laser (BEFL) is experimentally discussed. In the BEFL, an erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) is incorporated into the Brillouin laser resonator to enhance small Brillouin gain, which makes the configuration of the Brillouin laser resonator easy and flexible. The experimental results show that the output power of the BEFL has a threshold against the Brillouin pump power, and above the Brillouin threshold, the output power increases linearly with the EDFA pump power. The BEFL threshold decreases with increasing the length of the optical fiber in the laser resonator used as a Brillouin gain medium. The BEFL oscillates in a stable single longitudinal mode because the bandwidth of the Brillouin gain profile is very narrow (30 MHz). The relative intensity noise (RIN) and the spectral lineshape were measured. The noise floor level decreases with increasing the EDFA pump power, and the full-width at half maximum of the BEFL was measured to be about 8 kHz.