Chaotic dynamics in erbium-doped fiber ring lasers

Chaotically oscillating rare-earth-doped fiber ring lasers (DFRLs) may provide an attractive way to exploit the broad bandwidth available in an optical communications system. Recent theoretical and experimental investigations have successfully shown techniques to modulate information onto the wide-band chaotic oscillations, transmit that signal along an optical fiber, and demodulate the information at the receiver. We develop a theoretical model of a DFRL and discuss an efficient numerical simulation which includes intrinsic linear and nonlinear induced birefringence, both transverse polarizations, group velocity dispersion, and a finite gain bandwidth. We analyze first a configuration with a single loop of optical fiber containing the doped fiber amplifier, and then, as suggested by Roy and VanWiggeren, we investigate a system with two rings of optical fiber—one made of passive fiber alone.  The typical round-trip time for the passive optical ring connecting the erbium-doped amplifier to itself is 200 ns, so ≈10⁵ round-trips are required to see the slow effects of the population inversion dynamics in this laser system. Over this large number of round-trips, physical effects like GVD and the Kerr nonlinearity, which may appear small at our frequencies and laser powers via conventional estimates, may accumulate and dominate the dynamics. We demonstrate from our model that chaotic oscillations of the ring laser with parameters relevant to erbium-doped fibers arises from the nonlinear Kerr effect and not from interplay between the atomic population inversion and radiation dynamics.