Performance characteristics and output power stability of a multichannel fibre laser

The effect of the density and number of spectral channels on the output power stability in a multichannel cw laser has been studied theoretically and experimentally. In our calculations, we used a model in which the interaction between channels due to gain medium saturation was determined by channel frequency spacingdependent cross-saturation coefficients. The key features of lasing have been analysed and illustrated by the examples of three-, fiveand nine-channel lasers. It has been shown that, at a given excess of the pump power over threshold, the channel powers can be equalised by introducing additional losses into the highest power channels. At a sufficiently high channel density, raising the pump power then leads to termination of lasing in the even channels. As the number of channels increases, the laser system retains its stability, but the time needed for the transition to a steady state increases sharply. In our experiments, we used an erbium-doped fibre laser whose design ensured independent control over the powers of up to 40 spectral channels anchored on the telecommunication frequency grid. Our experimental data are in qualitative agreement with the calculation results. In particular, a long-term relative instability less than 3 dB was only observed at a number of channels less than seven and channel frequency spacings above 400 GHz. Instability was shown to increase with an increase in the number and density of channels.