Saturable absorption properties of multi-core nonlinear fiber arrays

摘要

The saturable absorption performance of several one dimensional and two dimensional multi-core fiber array couplers are investigated as a function of the number of the fiber cores. The results indicate that the performance of all these saturable absorbers are comparable and not much is gained, if any, by increasing the number of cores. Hence, rather than using complex multi-core fiber saturable absorbers, one can benefit from the simpler two-core fiber setup to get the desired output mode-locked pulses. This observation is supported by the comparable pulse characteristics obtained from the simulation of a generic mode-locked fiber laser cavity.